Florida Coastal Storm Originated As Missouri MCS

Jun 1, 2011; 8:45 AM ET

The storm system moving into eastern Florida from the northeast today (quite unusual) is the remnants of a Mesoscale Convective System (MCS: a large cluster of organized thunderstorms) that originated in Missouri on the morning of May 29th. Three days later, this is what it looks like approaching the state, when you overlay lightning strikes on top of the Enhanced Infrared Satellite via MapSpace:

Our news article on the system says “The system… may behave a bit like a tropical storm with a brief period of gusty winds and localized flooding downpours.” Most of those winds are going to come from the thunderstorms themselves, as the surface (model) analysis from RadarPlus this morning shows a weak counterclockwise rotation but almost no large-scale winds:

The image below shows a closeup Visible Satellite with wind direction and (positive-only) lightning strikes overlaid.

Here’s a satellite loop showing the origin of the storm, and an Enhanced Satellite Loop showing the storm last night.