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Sunday's Screaming Southeaster


CT Rain

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29 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

And to add to that, 50-65 on the coast even with leaves...not as big of a deal. 50-65 or perhaps stronger in the interior with tall trees not used to strong winds...disaster. 

It was NBD on any of the coastal areas in all 5 states for the most part, This post is about a spot on as it gets, Some of us discussed this on sunday but as weenies, It only sinks into some when it comes from a Met.

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12 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

I think also based upon what I've seen ... the wind did bust in the interior, but, ...I don't think (more specifically) it busted for the usual reason having to do with BL limitations/mixing...inversion and all that jazz.   It looks to me like the axis of the jet core was modeled wrongly  - a subtlety I don't think is getting much focus. 

Could be wrong - just the way it looks ... As though it verified a tad E of plans... which may be lost and/or confused in the fact that littorals and coastal zones are always more exposed/prone to wind impacts?  

As a point of muse ... I don't think we could have run 70+ kt sustained wind through that low of an altitude, even in the interior, and just get 22 kt surface wind puffs out of it ..that's the first possible hint.  We didn't have THAT much inversion in the Worcester Hills. It was a like a perfect combination to really polarize the results here;  BL resistance, combining with a jet that verified slightly E where it mixes better anyway, and you end up with a super steep decline in physical presentation (to put it nicely...) of the event.  

If you looked at the power outage maps, It's quite clear the interior coastal community's just away from the water and the ones on the coastal plain bared the brunt of this one as well as the folks that were just to the east of the SLP over in VT, Backside winds, Were really NBD.

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For mby there was a memorable 2-3 hour period which the winds were better than Sandy..but other than that..CoastalWx is right that it wasn't anything that a very strong winter storm can't match (along the coast). 

If Philippe had matured to a hurricane before transitioning and slung up further west..it could be have been a lot worse

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1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

It's pretty simple.  If you live in those areas that got hit hard and never really have wind damage (parts of interior CT and then NE MA up to NH and Maine) it's going to be remembered for a long time by the public. In other areas, it likely will not be remembered.  These wind events are a dime a dozen for CC and cstl MA. The difference this time around, is the foliage and wet ground. 

You Eastern New England guys always forget VT...might as well be NY ;).

Some are now being told maybe you'll get power by the weekend.  Glad I bailed to NY to the folks house for a couple days.  

This will be our local areas most disruptive storm in quite a while.  

Cant wait to get back and drive around town for photos once all the roads and lines are back in place.

 

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1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

And to add to that, 50-65 on the coast even with leaves...not as big of a deal. 50-65 or perhaps stronger in the interior with tall trees not used to strong winds...disaster. 

Bingo.  

Also direction matters.  

Lots of snapped trees but the canopy itself has evolved to take higher winds from the northwest.  You can see it with less density of branches on the NW side and more robust growth on the SE side.  A much smaller version of the flag trees in the mountains that have no branches on the N/W side but growth on the SE.

Trees just aren't used to taking a beating from that side.  Even SVR thunderstorms have winds coming in from the west/northwest.  

Looking at a lot of the obs, it seems the stations up here were more ESE which is even rarer for big winds.  

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12 hours ago, OceanStWx said:

Question probably better answered by @tamarack but I do believe trees adapt to their environment. The background wind is dominated by NW in our region (just due to stronger speeds in the winter). 

Some trees respond to "chronic" wind stress by thickening roots for resistance, so would be stronger against NW wind in our area.  I've never encountered quantitative research on this phenomenon, though I'm sure it exists.  My one event (Bob) with both SE and NW winds probably just confuses things.  A nice stand of mature bigtooth aspen - tends to be sounder than its quaking cousin - was 2/3 flattened.  1/3 fell from the SE winds, 1/3 from the NW backside, proving only that aspens in general are very vulnerable - shallow roots, weak wood, high height-diameter ratio, and most of the sail area at the top of the stick.

NNE reports are particularly impressive.  Looks like our family's  summer cabin town of MT. Vernon Maine is almost 100 percent without power.   

Co-worker from there is still w/o power, reports dozens of trees down, mainly white pine.  He noted a string of 8 bucket trucks from NY heading thru the town.  Ours came on at 9:25 last evening; we'd gone to bed early, and suddenly there were lights and blaring TV (had been on when things went dark 15 hours earlier) - woke me up, but with relief rather than irritation.  We're at the end of the maintained gravel road, 2,000' from pavement and with just 3 residences so lowest of low priorities for restoration.  That said, this was our 2nd longest outage in 19+ years (30 hours in Dec 2000 tops) with #3 at only 4-5 hours, so no complaints about service (so far.)

No doubt soggy soil and late foliage retention were major factors to the south, but they were bit players in my general area.  Probably 3/4 of the fallen trees I've seen had broken off above ground, and we had 90%+ leaf drop going into the storm, so that was a minor factor. 

Given CMP's outage figures plus an unknown (to me) number north of their service area, I'm confident that over 2/3 of Maine's people were powerless at peak outage.  But it's a low population state so it doesn't really matter.

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11 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Some trees respond to "chronic" wind stress by thickening roots for resistance, so would be stronger against NW wind in our area.  I've never encountered quantitative research on this phenomenon, though I'm sure it exists.  My one event (Bob) with both SE and NW winds probably just confuses things.  A nice stand of mature bigtooth aspen - tends to be sounder than its quaking cousin - was 2/3 flattened.  1/3 fell from the SE winds, 1/3 from the NW backside, proving only that aspens in general are very vulnerable - shallow roots, weak wood, high height-diameter ratio, and most of the sail area at the top of the stick.

NNE reports are particularly impressive.  Looks like our family's  summer cabin town of MT. Vernon Maine is almost 100 percent without power.   

Co-worker from there is still w/o power, reports dozens of trees down, mainly white pine.  He noted a string of 8 bucket trucks from NY heading thru the town.  Ours came on at 9:25 last evening; we'd gone to bed early, and suddenly there were lights and blaring TV (had been on when things went dark 15 hours earlier) - woke me up, but with relief rather than irritation.  We're at the end of the maintained gravel road, 2,000' from pavement and with just 3 residences so lowest of low priorities for restoration.  That said, this was our 2nd longest outage in 19+ years (30 hours in Dec 2000 tops) with #3 at only 4-5 hours, so no complaints about service (so far.)

No doubt soggy soil and late foliage retention were major factors to the south, but they were bit players in my general area.  Probably 3/4 of the fallen trees I've seen had broken off above ground, and we had 90%+ leaf drop going into the storm, so that was a minor factor. 

Given CMP's outage figures plus an unknown (to me) number north of their service area, I'm confident that over 2/3 of Maine's people were powerless at peak outage.  But it's a low population state so it doesn't really matter.

And this is why it's hard for me to justify spending $5,000+ on an install. It's just you never know how long the outage will be, but for us, up until now, we've only lost power a few times that lasted <1hr each. I get more annoyed by the quick on/off that we seem to get at least once a month.

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Location matters....this is a big forum in terms of aerial coverage. A good chunk of Maine saw pretty big impact from this storm...as well as at least the eastern 1/3rd to 1/2 of NH and parts of VT. For MA? Not that big of a deal over probably >80% of the state. Some localized pockets of intense wind definitely caused big damage...we're looking at areas near Taunton, maybe a few rogue spots on the Cape if that 93mph wind gust is legit...and then again a nice pocket up in far NE MA where power is still out...the Dracut/Tyngsoborugh/Chelmsford/Andover/Boxford/ corridor. Pretty much everyone else though did not get hit that hard....high end advisory stuff. That will bring some limbs down and the occasional weak tree...much like a 52mph wind gust from a summer T-storm....but otherwise, not that weird. Southern RI to parts of SE CT look like they got a pretty solid hit of high wind warning criteria. Not sure about the rest of CT, but once you got back into the CT valley, it doesn't sound like it was a big deal.

 

So I think it's very easy to put the IMBY stamp on this system that will conflict with the views of many others.

 

IMHO, it was definitely an impressive southeaster...we typically don't get widespread >40 knots on that type of wind direction. So often, things bust because of inversions on that direction but we were able to overcome a lot of that. I will say though, this is definitely a good storm to critique those weenie ECMWF wind gust maps...they were way overdone. One of my pet peeves is probably seeing stuff like that posted (snowfall maps included) and someone saying "the Euro shows X"....no, the Euro did not show that, it was the algorithm that showed it. Some stuff is legit directly from the model, like the height field, wind field, SLP, and even the QPF...other stuff is completely derived and those wind gust maps are definitely derived via some algorithm that someone put together. So it's probably important to parse the difference between actual model output, and derived algorithms.

 

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1 hour ago, dryslot said:

If you looked at the power outage maps, It's quite clear the interior coastal community's just away from the water and the ones on the coastal plain bared the brunt of this one as well as the folks that were just to the east of the SLP over in VT, Backside winds, Were really NBD.

 

32 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

You Eastern New England guys always forget VT...might as well be NY ;).

Some are now being told maybe you'll get power by the weekend.  Glad I bailed to NY to the folks house for a couple days.  

This will be our local areas most disruptive storm in quite a while.  

Cant wait to get back and drive around town for photos once all the roads and lines are back in place.

 

I didn't forget you...........:)

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2 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

Southern RI to parts of SE CT look like they got a pretty solid hit of high wind warning criteria. Not sure about the rest of CT, but once you got back into the CT valley, it doesn't sound like it was a big deal.

I the CT River was the dividing line for CT.  There were pockets west of that but from my travels and looking at the power outage maps eastern CT got hit much worse than western.

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16 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

Still needs a name for people to recall it more than a few months from now...now I feel like TWC...ugh

Thank God it didn't have a name. Tropical Storms get so much extra media attention compared to a storm of similar intensity/impact without a name. 

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5 minutes ago, Baroclinic Zone said:

Meteorologically it may have been but from a human perspective it won't be.

Well if I only look at it through IMBY perspective than it wasn't. I lost a few branches and gusted to 28 mph on my roof. But getting 180,000 power outages in CT along with 5" of rain in spots and the damage up across northern New England made it a pretty good storm. 

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1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

Bingo.  

Also direction matters.  

Lots of snapped trees but the canopy itself has evolved to take higher winds from the northwest.  You can see it with less density of branches on the NW side and more robust growth on the SE side.  A much smaller version of the flag trees in the mountains that have no branches on the N/W side but growth on the SE.

Trees just aren't used to taking a beating from that side.  Even SVR thunderstorms have winds coming in from the west/northwest.  

Looking at a lot of the obs, it seems the stations up here were more ESE which is even rarer for big winds.  

I had mentioned this on Sunday and i see Tamarack responded to it as well, We routinely see winds more out of the WNW and can be quite gusty with winds in the 40 mph+ range with minimum problems.

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2 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

More personally ... I literally said in my head before bed that night ... god I hope this misses to my east.  My reasons for that sentiment are because my home is utterly and purely electrical.  There is no other anything.  No power means nothing.. no heat. no hot water... no lights. Nothing. I just when faced with that reality, one tends to grow up a little ?

If you're on a well like so many of us no power also means you can't even flush. I filled two 5 gallon buckets on Sunday morning in anticipation of the power going out.

1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

You Eastern New England guys always forget VT...might as well be NY ;).

Some are now being told maybe you'll get power by the weekend.  Glad I bailed to NY to the folks house for a couple days.  

This will be our local areas most disruptive storm in quite a while.  

Cant wait to get back and drive around town for photos once all the roads and lines are back in place.

 

Did you see some of the pics of the mt bike trails around Stowe? What a mess, the trails are closed for the foreseeable future until they can get in and clean things up. Someone said in one of the FB threads that there was a downburst in Saxon woods and that place is a total disaster area. 

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