April 12-14, 2014 Weather in Central Iowa

After fishing on Saturday, I learned the temperature had risen to at least 84 degrees F!  That was probably 13 degrees warmer than what had been forecast.   It was windy enough to keep things cool, but I did get too much sun.

That evening, we had a beautiful lightning storm!  I went out on the front porch with my cell phone and took some video, then saved individual frames as images.  Here's a short segment of video that had a lot of good lightning:
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Here's some of the better still shots I saved from that video:

Saturday evening, it proceeded to rain, and didn't really stop until early Monday morning, when it turned to sleet/snow.  Not a lot of snow accumulation, but the grass was nearly buried.  

Also, early Sunday morning we got some hail, and given the warmth of the air on Saturday, and the strength of the storm on the radar...I definitely gave thought to the possibility of a tornado forming!  I don't think our hail was particularly large, but I heard of hail just south of Des Moines was 2" golf-ball size.  And I also heard that Cedar Rapids or Cedar Falls even had some BASEBALL size hail!  Yowza!

It had been pretty dry here, so the rain was much needed.  I heard we got maybe a bit over 2" for the weekend, and everything is nicely soaked now.  Should help get the Spring growth jumpstarted...well, as soon as the snow & ice melts, that is!