Flash Flood — Cuyahoga, Ohio

2023-07-20 · near Westlake, Cuyahoga, Ohio

Event narrative

Flash flooding across the western suburbs of Cleveland, including Bay Village, North Olmsted, Fairview Park, Rocky River and Lakewood. Notable road closures due to flooding include I-90 East near McKinley Avenue and West 117th Avenue between Berea Road and Detroit Avenue in Lakewood, West 130th Street and Bellaire Road and West 150th Street north of Brookpark Road in Cleveland. Great Northern Avenue north of Brookpark Road was flooded with several feet of standing water in North Olmsted. Extensive basement flooding reported, including between 1 to 2 dozen basements in Bay Village and 175 basements in Fairview Park.

Wider weather episode

A surface low moved generally eastward from east-central Lower MI to the southeastern shore of Lake Huron during the evening of the 20th. Simultaneously, the low's warm front swept northeastward across southern ON and western NY toward the northern shore of Lake Ontario as the low's trailing cold front moved generally eastward across southeastern Lower MI and far-northeastern IN to central Lake Erie and northeastern OH.

Multiple lines and clusters of multicell thunderstorms persisted generally eastward and southeastward across northern OH during the early through mid-evening hours of the 20th and produced sporadic severe hail and straight-line convective wind damage as the storms encountered moderate to strong MUCAPE and effective bulk shear, respectively, within the warm sector. An embedded supercell produced large hail in Westlake, a western suburb of Cleveland. Although the thunderstorms moved progressively across the area, the thunderstorms produced torrential rainfall across Cuyahoga County, with instantaneous rainfall rates of 4 to 5 inches per hour and rainfall totals of 1.75 to 2.5 inches in a period of one hour or less. The torrential rainfall resulted in instances of flash flooding.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (41.4694, -81.9222)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1134209. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.