…but this time it’s not in Wichita.
More than 10 inches of rain fell in Gove County over about a 5-hour period Wednesday, but no tropical storm or hurricane is to blame.
“It was a crazy amount of rain,” Mick McGuire, a senior meteorologist with the Goodland office of the National Weather Service, told me.
A resident who lives four miles southeast of Grainfield in Gove County recorded 10.6 inches of rain, and a nearby neighbor reported 11 inches. To put those totals in perspective, they surpass even the 10.31 inches of rain that fell on Wichita over a 24-hour period on Sept. 12.
A cluster of thunderstorms developed along a warm front, McGuire said, and as they moved east new storms would develop along the same line. It’s a pattern known as “training” – storms following the same line like railroad cars on a track – and it can lead to substantial amounts of rain falling in a small area.
Remarkably, no flash flooding was reported as a result of the heavy rain.
“It was a pretty small area,” McGuire said, comparing it to “a bullseye” on radar. You can see that in the radar image below.
Rainfall totals from Wednesday in northwest Kansas