We had a hell of a storm go through the area early in the morning of 15 April 2026, with a phone alert waking me up around 01:30 and the county civil defense sirens going off a few minutes later. Here’s some footage from my front porch on the north side of Ypsilanti about two minutes before I decided it was time to get my husband to the basement:
(Taken around 01:49 Eastern Time, 15 April 2026)
The last time I saw the sky flash like that was watching transformers blow across the river in New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Fortunately our neighborhood didn’t suffer other than getting very web, but the Ann Arbor Ice Rink lost some walls and the Yost Ice Arena at the University of Michigan lost part of its roof.
Here’s a graph of some barometric pressure readings from my home monitoring system. The top line is an every 15 minute poll from the National Weather Service data taken at KYIP the Willow Run Airport outside of Ypsilanti. The bottom line is picked up from one of my Aranet4 Sensors which broadcasts over Bluetooth every minute. Both units are in hPa. You can see a steady decline until around 01:50, and then a sharp increase at about 02:05-02:10. Interestingly, that straight line on the Aranet4 reading is indicitive of missed data, but I typically only see that when the Bluetooth stack on the Debian box I’m monitoring this on falls over, and when it does that it hasn’t auto-recovered, I’ve always had to reboot the damn thing. Especially fascinating to me as that was during the heaviest part of the storm, but I don’t know if that’s anything but coincidental.