Ser Pounce

Sorry to disappoint but from the perspective of basically next to Charles Towne Landing Park in Charleston (across Ashley River from downtown), not a lot happened at all. I did get to go show my 7 year old what high tide was, what storm surge is, and what it looks like when you combine the two which he thought was cool. That, plus a few downed sticks and lots of frogs out this evening were really about it. Schools are on e-learning tomorrow so I'll be using PTO to supervise that too.

High tide over here (Charleston) is around 8:30 and they're talking about 3-5' of storm surge. That's on top of the tropical storm warning / hurricane watch, so it looks like the usual flooding is going to happen around the lower parts of downtown. Unless the track really shifts overhead and we pick up a lot more rain it looks like the biggest problem in the metro will be power outages. In the immediate area Dominion trimmed everything a good 6' or more back from power lines (looks like a hungry dinosaur came through). People complained about it to no end but they'll be glad it happened later tonight.

Yep, I'm watching this one. In Charleston it's also all about the tides and storm surge and that's way too early to guess on at this point. Looks like a good test for the drainage improvements put in place earlier this year, plus motivation to wrap up the job.

As of right now not a lot is going on in Charleston. Windy enough to knock down pine cones and twigs and light rain every so often. My neighbor has a bradford pear that he's parked his Hummer H2 close to. The tree is around as big as they get before they start dropping big branches so the fates have been tempted.

In Charleston getting ready for lots of rain I was definitely feeling a wind chill while outdoors!

I screwed that up, for some reason I read "between Charleston and Myrtle Beach" instead of Hilton Head. But it seems like from a Charleston perspective year after year models tend to shift farther up the coast over time than not. At this point my biggest concern is how to manage virtual learning on Friday since that's what schools are doing. That and runoff control. Need to wrap up what I'm doing at work and phone in that I need to use PTO for the rest of the day. Push notification for storm surge warning just went out for whatever that's worth.

That would be better from a local perspective than a SAV-CHS landfall I suppose. I'm going to have to start getting the place ready for a big rain event though. Lots of gutters missing because of work on the house so I'll probably have to go temp install some of the scraps they left lying around to get some kind of coverage for the place. edit: I screwed up, read Myrtle Beach instead of Hilton Head which would have been a different scenario for CHS being farther up the coast.

Agreed, that's where I am. I'm starting on drainage work at home today, but it's something that needed to happen anyway. It's been interesting watching this one run east but there's a lot of time left. Tomorrow will be when a lot of locals really start paying attention.

Likewise in Charleston. I could see us getting 6 inches or hardly anything at all. Just depends on how much to the south this thing is able to make it. Right now it's sunny and breezy. The only things coming down are loose leaves, sticks, and pine straw but the clouds are really moving quick.

And this is the kind of thing that I'm definitely watching out for. Don't have an models or the NHC in front of me at the moment, but wasn't that turn supposed to happen later tonight?

We must have a good one, the local channel I like shows the Euro and GFS models along with others sometimes and explains the difference between them.

Especially when it seems like everything has been trending south for a while now. I'm anxiously looking forward to the NHC's next update. I'm also curious about how they handle all the models that keep showing southwest movement off the coast on this one.

Depends on your location!

Which if that holds true, turns into nowcasting for all of us farther down the coast. A lot of people I've talked to have assumed it would be fairly weak when it moves SW. Staying stronger would change the game just a bit.

That's when the respective areas have at least a 5% chance of receiving TS winds, so they're going to show early date and times to reflect faster possible motion of the system.

Staying in Charleston, but really curious about storm surge. It's too early to start talking about that, unfortunately.

I'm not buying that much weakening - Google Maps suggests the center would be ~75 miles offshore. You get this, plus storm surge stacking up from the slow southwest movement and that makes a mess of trouble and that's before it dumps on upstate SC and NC.

Looks ugly for Charleston - the storm appears far enough offshore to stay strong and then looks like a Kiawah landfall which is always described as the worst case scenario here.

If it stalled over the gulf stream, probably not like most think it would.

The only way I can think of to make it worse is to bump the center offshore so it can stay stronger.

Plus you have a whole lot of places exposed to northeast quadrant storm surge that weren't before. This one would change everything.

What are the wind gusts in Charleston after hour 105 as it passes down?

Does anyplace show the wind field for GFS-FV3 like weather.us does for the Euro? edit: I'm blind. Don't know how I missed it in the drop down.

It's a long wait to see the 12z ECMWF now that it looks like we're clustering closer to the NC/SC border. There's not a lot of movement to the southwest that can happen before things start looking really ugly for Charleston.

Our 'bug out' places are Aiken or Charlotte where we know people. Euro says Charlotte would be better, everyone else says good luck getting back from there, go to Aiken. There's plenty of watching and waiting in store today. We aren't taking anything in particular as gospel, there's just too much uncertainty from a Charleston perspective.