The Severe Weather Team 9 meteorologists collaborated with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh to determine a list ranking the top 5 weather events to affect the Ohio Valley in 2012.

The list considers the weather event itself with the impacts felt locally.

The number 4 ranked storm is a September rain event that had a record-setting outcome.

A quiet campus that sits atop a hill was the centralized spot for the crazy weather created in the Ohio Valley on Sept. 1.

A rainfall record was shattered in Steubenville thanks to a meteorological phenomenon called training and the remnants of Hurricane Isaac.

"The leftover circulation was really kind of churning in the Midwest and just continued to bring rain," said Tom Green of the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh.

Franciscan University sits on a highly elevated ridge in Jefferson County along the banks of the Ohio River, where there is ample opportunity for drainage. But it just wasn’t possible in the downpour on that rainy September night. Campus looked more like a lake, or at times, a waterfall inside building stairwells.

"If you are able to end up getting ponding of water at the top of a hill as opposed to having it run off into some low lying area, then certainly you must have had some really impressive rainfall rates," said Green.

A line of heavy thunderstorms parked itself through the center of the viewing area, dropping torrential rains.

"We normally refer to that as training if you just have a line of showers moving over the same place," said Green.

But initially, 4 inch rainfall reports seemed high.  Radar estimates only figured about 2 inches had fallen.

As it turned out, Doppler radar wasn't in the proper mode to detect tropical rain drops; rather it was looking for continental rain drops.

"Those are going to end up giving you completely different rainfall rates, because the volume of rain you end up having overall is going to be different," said Green.

What was even more stunning with this storm--while eastern Jefferson County saw nearly 4 inches in 3 hours no other observation stations reported more than 2 inches in the whole day.