Tropical-Like Drenching Thunderstorms - August 6, 2024 Pompton Plains, NJ

Yesterday was probably the busiest thunderstorm day we've had yet this Summer across the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area. There were many variables synoptically that were going on across the region that led to numerous thunderstorms developing and causing many severe weather impacts such as flooding and wind damage. After days of pretty disgusting hot and humid weather, a very slow-moving cold front began to approach from the northwest and stall over the region. By Tuesday afternoon, numerous showers and thunderstorms developed along the front. However, because the boundary was very slow-moving, the storms did not blow through the region like they would in a typical cold frontal setup. Instead, the storms stalled over the region and began to train, causing many areas to have major flooding issues, and more and more storms kept developing through the afternoon hours because of numerous outflow boundaries present across the region, and storms developing along them. Another hazard that was present for this event was a fetch of tropical moisture from Tropical Storm Debby in the Southeast U.S. This meant that rainfall rates in the storms were higher than normal due to the tropical moisture that was injected into the front from Debby, and this in combination with the slow-moving nature of the storms caused some problems. Some areas in central NJ got up to 6-7 inches of rain! The storms also caused severe-level winds and water-loaded downbursts in some spots, resulting in wind damage and power outages, and of course they were producing very frequent lightning.
Now it's time to talk about what my town got. In the grand scheme of things, we didn't get it that bad, luckily, but it was still notable. My town avoided the storms for much of the day until the late afternoon/evening hours, with it just being hot and humid and partly to mostly cloudy. Storm clouds began to build in from the south later in the afternoon as the outflow boundaries caught up to our region and storms developed along them and moved slowly up towards the north. Sooner or later a storm line blew in from the south. The wind with it was luckily not too damaging but still pretty gusty, with some gusts maybe towards 35-40 MPH. When the rain came in, it looked like a hurricane outside for a short while, and we had around an inch of rain in just 25-30 minutes time. Thankfully, the heaviest rain did not last for that long in our region, or else we would've had some flooding issues. Also, we didn't really get under training convection that would've also caused issues. There was a couple minor things that happened: our gazebo that we had set up in the backyard for a party partially collapsed, presumably from the weight of the heavy rain. Me and my dad had to go out in the rain and lightning to clean that up, but we eventually managed to do it. We also had our power knocked out from a lightning strike that hit a transformer. We lost it for only 30 seconds, but other parts of town had it out longer. To summarize, as this is probably the longest description I've ever written, even though we still got some pretty good storms move through the region, we didn't get hit quite as bad as many other parts of the state. Today, as we are on the other side of the boundary that moved through yesterday, it hasn't gotten out of the 60s all day, so talk about an air mass change. The boundary is going to start moving back up north however by tomorrow as the remnants of Debby pass through the mid-Atlantic, so we'll see what happens with that.