Strong Afternoon Thunderstorms Develop on Sea Breeze in East

11 September 2013, 5PM UTC: Late this afternoon warm sunshine in the western coastal region (Haute Guinea) pushed high temperatures to 27 – 31 C which created a situation that cause a sea-breeze wind shift to push inland from off the cooler waters of the Atlantic Ocean. This wind shift created convergence areas in the warm humid air mass over the West that generated thunderstorms. The image below is a snapshot of this event underway.

Satellite imagery cleary showed the storms along the eastern areas with plenty of warm sunshine remaining in the interior.

A strong storm near Kamsar generated very heavy rain, frequent lightning and a wind gust of 67 km/hr. Our total lightning detection system generated a number of Dangerous Thunderstorm Alerts warning of these occurences. These storms also dropped temperatures as much as 10 C in the locations they occured to as low as 20C. These storms will continue to develop and decay until 7pm UTC.