Along with quite the lightning show and heavy rain, last night’s storms produced a lot of hail.  If your reading this, there is a pretty good chance at least one of the storm cells brought you some hail.  Fortunately most of the hail was less then one inch in diameter, but there were a few isolated occurrences where the hail was larger.  The largest hail reported was just northwest of Neillsville at 2 inches in Diameter.  Golf Ball size hail (1.75″) was also reported just west of Merrill and north of Wausau. 

There was also scattered reports of trees and limbs down across the area due to wind and lighting.  Tree Damage was reported in Phillips, Park Falls, Prentice( you can see the price county theme).  Tree damage was also reported in Spencer and Merrill.

Most importantly, most places picked up around an inch of rain.  Merrill saw about an inch and a half!!  This good soaking rain brought our April rain total back to around average, and with a lot more rain expected later tonight and into tomorrow, we could be well above average by Monday.

Here of some pictures sent in from the storms, thanks to all for taking them.  Don’t forget, you can also send us pictures using the Report Storms link on the top of the weather page. 

Meteorologist Brian Niznansky

Posted under Severe Weather, Spring, Storms, Viewer pictures

We haven’t had any precipitation since we launched the new I-Trak Radar on waow.com, but I hope you had a chance to get a little familiar with some the tools the new interactive radar has to offer.  You can access I-Trak Radar by following the link on the top of the weather page.  Tonight I wanted to talk about another cool new feature added to the website.  We have now launched “Report Storms”. 

Report Storms is another way you can get involved with reporting the area weather.  Simply click on the report storm tag on the top of the weather page.  This will take you to reportstorms.com.  This page will allow you to report any kind of weather you feel should be summited.  Whether it’s a high temperature for the day, rainfall amount, or a tornado, we would love to hear about it.  And the coolest part, not only do we receive your information but it is automatically integrated into graphics so we have the ability to pull up your actual report on-air.  Once we start getting in several reports, I would love to often use this during the weather cast.  This will also help us out a ton.  We could never have too much local observation.  You will also have the ability to submit photos or even video.  I know it will take sometime to get people involved but the more reports we get the more useful it will be.  So check it out and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Meteorologist Brian Niznansky

Posted under iTRAK, Storms, Viewer pictures