WVNS

What happened around the area? Recapping this past week’s weather

GHENT, WV (WVNS) — On your typical week, sometimes you have relaxed and calming weather days. But this past week, Mother Nature showed us that she can also have her intense ones.

This past week, roughly from July 25th, 2022 to Friday, July 29th, proved to be an active week thanks in part due to a perfect storm of situations. Because the weather phenomenon itself and the location of the phenomenon, it led to many life-changing impacts across West Virginia.

Lets first start off with the weather phenomenon. This past week, we had a frontal system develop over the middle part of the Eastern United States. The issue is that this frontal system was a Stationary Front, a frontal system that happens when a hot and cold air mass meet together and they collide together.

The issue is that as the name suggests, this front was indeed stationary, and this is because the two air masses are constantly fighting for control and neither one of them succeeding. Thus, what you get is a system that sticks around, and this causes heavy rainfall and strong storms in a particular area.

The second issue we ran into is the location of this stationary front. By the beginning of this past week, the front had positioned itself directly over the West Virginia area.

Below are photos of flooding in the Hanover area of Wyoming County:

On top of that, the cold air mass was concentrated over West Virginia. In a stationary front, most of the showers and storms occur along the cold air mass and that is what caused most of this weeks rainfall.

This combination of issues led to the massive amounts of rainfall we have seen across the area. The largest amounts of rainfall occurred over McDowell, Wyoming, and Fayette county where we saw over 5 inches of rain over the past 5 days.

Below are photos from Route 41 in Fayette County as the road began washing away due to flooding:

But most of the area saw over 3 inches of rainfall over the past 5 days and this proved to have serious consequences. From down trees all the way to even direct flooding damage, the rainfall remained trap and caused flooding around the region.

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