Un named storm April 1979 in South Florida

[boca]

Frank 2 brought up a storm in April of 1979 and I researched it and came up empty. I looked on weather underground and their was none on record. The reason why I bring this up is because I remembered that storm because we had 16 inches of rain in Coral Springs in one night.Everything was flooded, the canals were into the streets. The news crews were at Coral Springs Drive and Sample Rd due to the fact a truck went into the canal due to the flooding. Does anyone that lived here during that period remember this event.

[rainydaze]

I remember a big rain/flooding event here in west palm beach when I was a kid. School was cancelled and I remember all us kids playing all day in the huge rain puddles left in our swales. I have often thought back on that day with great fondness because of how much fun we had that day after the rain stopped. And, as far as I know, it's the only time I ever remembered school being cancelled because of rain/flooding. I would have been 10 yrs old in April 1979 so I think that I may be remembering the same thing.

[Jinkers]

I remember that vaugly, I was really young.

[Blown Away]

Don't remember that storm, but a few months later David came through Jupiter with @90mph gusts. David was the first hurricane eye I experienced, I was hooked on weather after that.

[Frank2]

Boca,

Here's the July, 1979 Monthy Weather Review article of that unusual Spring weather season (the very last paragraph of the article mentions the low pressure system that we were discussing):

http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520- ... -7-948.pdf

P.S. I'm amazed that I found it so quickly (after just a moment or two) - since the late Dr. [Bob] Burpee was one of the Co-Editors of MWR at that time, I'd like to think that this was God's way of letting our old HRD friend say "Hello, Frank!"

[Cyclone1]

Cool, but non-tropical.

[AJC3]

Here are a couple more good links for those who like to research cyclones back toward the beginning of the GOES era. I'm sure these have been listed here before...

NCDC's GIBBS satellite archive browser...

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/rsad/gibbs/gibbs.html

Daily weather maps

http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/dwm/dat ... _maps.html

Some vis images of the cyclone in question

ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg

ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/isccp/b ... S-2-VS.jpg

Looks like a classic "right-sided" BI (baroclinically initiated) cyclone to me. The daily wx maps show a pretty stout 500 MB short wave trough in the westerlies digging southward to the central/eastern Gulf coast whilst coming pretty close to cutting off. This caused the cyclone to spin up over the eastern GOMEX. The low then proceded to move northward and inland over the southeast U.S.

I'll have to look up whether or not there was significant tornadic activity over FL from this event...it's a textbook example of a cyclone that would likely produce an outbreak over the peninsula.

note: the daily wx maps for the week of APR 23-29 are out of order, with hand-written notations made at the tops of some of the maps. This makes it a little difficult to follow the daily progression of the synoptic pattern

[TMT]

I'm not absolutely certain that this was the system I remember, particularly since I seem to recall the local weather people calling it a "depression" -- a little unusual terminology to describe April showers -- but the Boca Raton area received around 20" in a 24-hour period. My family actually ventured into Delray Beach in a VW Bug the next morning and found water so deep that we resorted to driving on the sidewalks. (Needless to say that downtown was almost completely deserted!)