At this time the thinking is that Debby may strengthen again into a weak Tropical Storm, as shown in the maximum wind speed probabilities table below, but should remain off the east coast of the United States. This means that the largest threats to the United States from here on out from Debby should just be some light rain as it exits the Southeast as well as some larger waves along the East Coast.
Despite never gaining hurricane strength, Debby did pack a punch for those affected by her. Tropical storm force winds occurred over a large area of the Florida Peninsula as well as along the Gulf Coast and areas of inland Florida all the way south to the Fort Myers area. Fortunately, most of this wind was below the speed needed to create more widespread damage though areas of isolated wind damage were reported, especially during the stronger thunderstorm bands which passed through the state.
These thunderstorm bands were responsible for more than just wind damage however, some of the strongest storms spawned tornadoes which resulted in one of the system’s two blamed fatalities thus far, the other resulting from a drowning. Below are the images depicting the severe weather reports from the system starting on June 23rd and proceeding through the 26th.
The 23rd resulted in 5 tornado reports, all in Florida due to intense bands of thunderstorms coming ashore and this scenario continued on the 24th, resulting in 20 more tornado reports across Florida. The 24th ended up being the most violent day from Debby in terms of severe weather as a few areas reported damaging wind gusts from thunderstorms as well. Below is an image showing Doppler Radar detected rotation with red lines across the state of Florida on the 24th along with the reports received and the location of the one fatality. It was a very active day for tornado warnings across the southern and central parts of the state as almost all of these rotation tracks prompted a tornado warning.
Over the past two days, the system has pushed across Florida, resulting in more heavy rain than damaging thunderstorms, though a few still existed. However, the tornado threat was over, as the right front quadrant of the storm had moved over the Atlantic waters more.
The main problem from Debby was her rain. Sitting nearly stalled out over the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico for a couple days, rain was continually dumped across parts of Florida. Below is the total precipitation over the past 7 days ending this morning across the Southeast.
Amounts in excess of five inches were pretty common across the central and northern parts of Florida with some of the heavier rain even affecting parts of southern Georgia as well. The hardest hit areas in terms of rainfall seemed to be around the Tampa region as well as the Crawfordville area east across the state into the Jacksonville region. Areas in these parts picked up greater than 10 inches of rainfall with some isolated areas probably picking up in excess of 20 inches of rainfall! This has resulted in flooding issues across many parts of Florida and the issuance of Flood Warnings. Gainesville, FL recorded their second highest three day precipitation amount at 12.02 inches and broke its all time record for most rain in the month of June with a total of 16.34 inches so far.
Below are some of the images showing the effects of Debby. All credit for these images goes to the USA Today and all of their storm images can be viewed here.