More Than Just A January Thaw

In the top image, cloud-to-cloud lightning stabs from behind trees on Brentwood Drive NE in Cedar Rapids, Iowa around 3:48 AM, Tuesday, January 29, 2013. The lightning was part of a thin line of thunderstorms that moved through the area Tuesday morning amid very unwinter-like conditions. The image, a 27-second exposure shot at f/13, 200 ISO and 18mm focal length, looks east. In the bottom image at left is a radar image of the same time period from the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities. A second line of storms, seen at lower left, arrived in the Cedar Rapids area just before 7:00 AM. At right in the bottom image, my Vantage Vue console tells the tale of the unseasonably warm weather conditions shown at 6:48 AM on Tuesday. The high of 58 degrees F broke the previous record high temperature of 53 degrees set in 1919. Several tornadoes from this system formed in the Ozarks and southern states on Tuesday evening. Inevitably, since it is January, a winter storm warning was issued just 12 hours after the thunderstorms blew through Cedar Rapids. 7 inches of snow fell overnight and into the day at this location on Wednesday.