jm1220

Anyway…if anything it’s about to get even worse in the western Carolinas. E upslope flow will be strengthening and heavier bands will be coming in from Helene. We see this now coming in from GA with numerous tornado warnings.

There's at least 4-5 of them that followed me into the house this evening. So annoying.

St Pete Airport had a gust to 82 earlier in a band. This will be a bad/nasty one for them but thankfully they dodged the bullet again by 100-150 miles.

The main story people talk about years later from this might be all the inland flood damage. The wind damage stories likely come from places like Valdosta and any other more major city inland. It's definitely very fortunate this is the best place in FL this could have come ashore. Doesn't do any good for Steinhatchee or other small towns directly in the worst surge, and places further south into Tampa Bay will also probably get some bad water damage. But yeah, a track 100 miles further SE would've been catastrophic.

Wonder if anyone was in St. Marks area, or got out if it's a surge zone? Seems like that area was exploding with lightning just before coming ashore.

On Google Maps it looks like a town with some homes up on stilts but a lot of smaller 1 story homes/buildings. Bet those will be gone soon if not already. Hope everyone got out of there.

Steinhatchee or whatever's left of it is probably in the worst of the surge. Tallahassee might be starting to get raked. Maybe a bit of a NNE jog resuming.

I mean the east eyewall would likely be the worst but 90-100 mph gusts in the western eyewall would at least mean thousands of trees down, decent property damage and no power/services for many days. I guess we'll see also if it wobbles NNE again which would give the city a chance of missing it. But they're in for some hurt it looks like.

It’s going to rise extremely fast with the eyewall coming ashore and the wind shift. And it seems like it’s all headed into high tide in a few hours. Really bad timing.

If you overlay the W eye wall and Tallahassee it’s due south of them, and looks like the eye is headed due N now. It’ll be really close.

The land it’s coming into is swamp, so it won’t weaken much if at all before it reaches I-10.

Gonna be a very close call in Tallahassee, storm is heading due N now it looks like and the NW eyewall should come close. For those places in the Big Bend about to be in the NE eyewall and the massive surge, well I just hope everyone there is out.

When I was a kid in the 90s we often saw these nickel and dime storms here with some clippers that dropped a few inches. Last winter was maybe a nickel winter where we had a couple minor events and one warning event in early Feb that still ended up well below normal but otherwise drenched with near record precip in the El Niño pattern. Lately though it has become much more boom and bust since we can get the big offshore coastal snowstorms that nail New England like Nemo 2013, Juno 2015 and the Jan 2022 storm, and also the massive El Niño ones like Jan 2016. But we can also get completely porked.

There’s a balance between more moisture since it often also means more warmth which carries the more moisture. Hopefully that “balance line” where more moisture means too much more warmth hasn’t passed my latitude yet and my average starts going down significantly, but that’s one consideration. I agree though that I-90 and north it’s still a good tradeoff. For DC though it’s hard to argue that they’ve begun a longer term snow downtrend and it seems to be creeping north over time. But La Niña which we seem to be in some permanent iteration of through the bad MJO phases and rampaging Pacific jet can still be salvageable around 40N with the right long wave pattern and some blocking.

But it doesn’t need much time at all to really bomb from here if everything’s finally figured out. And if anything it might be bad timing since there isn’t time for an EWRC to get underway.

Deep fast tropical feed from the E/SE upsloping several thousand feet in those mountains. It’ll be bad for sure and for some favored places to rain in that situation, horrendously bad. As others mentioned already over 6” rain in spots.

I think it’s too early to say “bust” and with intensity forecast I’m not sure what would qualify. Would 115-120mph instead of 130 count as bust? The rain forecast looks perfectly on track so I see no bust there. Surge is also dependent on several different factors.

If it can’t mix out the dry air it can stay over the water as long as it wants, it won’t organize as well as it can so it won’t bomb. It keeps having the same issue with wrapping the deep convection all the way around so we keep having the eye wall open up.

Cat 3 at landfall is definitely noteworthy but hopefully not catastrophic, so impact would be Idalia-like and in the same general area. Maybe somewhat more severe given the larger size. The inland impacts might be more spoken about in the end especially flood impact. I think it may be running out of time to really resolve these issues and make a run at Cat 4.

Wondering if Gatlinburg is west of the upslope zone on easterly flow. If so it might not be so bad there since from here on the rain will be coming on strong easterly flow and there will definitely be a downslope component in E TN. But places in NC/SC/GA that get heavy rain on that easterly flow-oh boy.

It’s almost a given with these eastern Gulf storms that they shift east in the end. Hopefully it doesn’t keep going too far.

I’m hoping for 2020-21 obviously, 07-08 was a dumpster fire for NYC filled with SWFEs that were plenty cold for I-90 but cold rain here. 08-09 would be better since that was about average snow.

It’s good that it seems to be targeting the least populated area it can but hopefully it stays far enough away from Tampa to not make that situation worse. The flooding impacts inland though are baked in no matter what it does at this point.

I guess maybe one difference is the Greenland block looks further north which would be good if it can stay that way and avoid combining with the SE ridge? I’m mentally prepared for another beyond awful “winter” coming but hopefully there can be at least one or two half decent periods like last season to put it one step above complete gutter.

If it can get east of Tallahassee that would be great news for them. Very little time for it to weaken before reaching there. Maybe there’s a “sweet spot” this can get to before it trends so far east the effects on Tampa Bay get much worse.