This satellite image, with text from Weather Underground, shows a very attractive looking satellite image from about 24 hours ago.  Karl is very well formed for a Central Atlantic tropical storm, moving through the region at that latitude.

Fortunately, Karl and all his well rounded organization is getting hung up in an extratropical feature. This is about as unthreatening a forecast track as yo will find.

Karl is bringing a bit of rain and wind to Bermuda right now, but after that, he is going to rocket northeast towards Ireland by tomorrow evening. With this broad band of troughing, with another round coming off the east coast to begin next week, the track for another tropical storm is similarly undaunting.

That is the weaker and still meandering Tropical Storm Lisa. This is typically the busiest time of the tropical season. Having that blocking trough available to take up nearly a week out of the busiest time of year is very good news for North America.

On Wednesday evening, a band of thunderstorms set up in the north metro of the Twin Cities, and were motionless for hours, dumping rain over the region for the duration. When they started moving, they initially did so by continuing to train across the I-694 corridor north of Minneapolis. All told, the town of Maple Grove, northwest of Minneapolis, had the highest total in the metropolitan area, coming at over 9 inches of rainfall.

Maple Grove wasn’t the highest total in the state of Minnesota Wednesday night, however. Additional strong, slow moving thunderstorms emerged in the southern part of the state. The town of Waseca, between Owatonna and Mankato received 14 inches or more! Take a look at this picture of the aftermath from KARE 11 in the Twin Cities.

The somewhat incredible thing is that Waseca isn’t on any creeks or rivers. All the flooding in town is a function of the volume of rain in Waseca, rather than rain there and upstream, for example.

That said, downstream locations, such as those in eastern Iowa, are anticipating floods down the line. There was significant rain in northeastern Iowa as well as what was seen in southern Minnesota, and places like Cedar Rapids, in particular, are in the process of considering evacuations of their downtown area. 

Areas of heavy rain were forecast over Southeastern MN Wednesday night into Thursday, as a stationary front camping out off to the south was expected to fire off slow-moving thunderstorms Wednesday evening. However, nobody expected what transpired to occur.

A thin line of storms developed around 530-6pm over the northern Twin Cities Metro, then continued to train in a west-east axis. For 3-4 straight hours, moderate to heavy rains sat over the exact same area, dumping prolific amounts of rain. Maple Grove reported 3.54″ in an hour at the onset, a 1-in-150-year rain event for the area. Around 6-8″ fell on the North Metro as activity slowly shifted southward and fanned out, dousing the rest of the Metro with 1-2″. Widespread flash flooding was reported in Maple Grove and nearby Brooklyn Park, with many water rescues being performed as motorists were caught off guard. Most areas have had the floodwaters subside by tonight, but a cold front expected to move into the region Saturday evening could complicate things with more thunderstorms.

Additional flooding happened in Southern MN, as storms blew up near Mankato and continued eastward to Rochester and La Crosse. Waseca was the unfortunate bullseye in this scenario, with over 7″ of rain being reported, bringing a 2-day total of theirs up to nearly a foot. Widespread flash flooding was reported in the area as well, as the ground just simply could not hold any more rain.