Nor'easter poised to dump heavy snows; Australian tropical cyclone season heats up
A developing low pressure system along the North Carolina coast will intensify today and move northeast towards Cape Cod, Massachusetts, bringing heavy rain and snow to the mid-Atlantic and New England. A swath of 6 - 10" of snow is expected over inland regions of New England, from Philadelphia to Boston. A storm surge of up to 2.5' is expected along the Massachusetts coast, which will cause mostly minor coastal flooding, but considerable erosion damage.
The 1.9" of snow that fell in Hartford, Connecticut yesterday brought that city's January snowfall total to 44.9", a new record for the month. With an additional 6 - 10 inches expected today, Hartford will surpass its record for snowiest month of all-time, the 45.3" that fell in December 1945.
The storm brought heavy rains of 1 - 3 inches to much of the Southeast yesterday, easing that region's La Niña-related drought. The low swept a cold front across Florida last night, bringing severe thunderstorms with damaging winds gusts of up to 75 mph to twenty locations in the state. One tornado was reported, but no significant damage was reported.
Figure 1. The cold front from today's Nor'easter swept across Florida last night, bringing a line of severe thunderstorms that spawned one tornado and numerous reports of damaging winds.
Tropical Cyclone activity heats up near Australia
The year's first Category 4 tropical cyclone is Tropical Cyclone Wilma, which is churning the waters near Tonga in the Southern Hemisphere with sustained winds of 135 mph (minimum Category 4 strength.) Wilma passed over American Samoa as a strong tropical storm, and hit Tonga as a Category 3 storm. Substantial damage has been reported on Tonga, but no deaths or injuries. Wilma is recurving out to sea, and will not affect Australia.
Australia is keeping an eye on Tropical Cylone Bianca, which is expected to skirt the northwest coast of the country over the next few days. Of much greater concern for Australia are two potential tropical cyclones that could hit the flood-ravaged state of Queensland next week. Both the European Center and GFS models predict that the remains of Tropical Cyclone Anthony will regenerate into a tropical storm late this week and hit Queensland early next week. A second and potentially more powerful storm is forecast to form next week in the islands to the east of Australia, and threaten Queensland at the end of the week. This is potentially terrible news for Australia, which is attempting to recover from record floods. As reported in the latest Bureau of Meteorology climate statement and flood summary, the past four months (September - December) have been the rainiest such period in Queensland's history, and the resulting flooding disaster has been Australia's most expensive natural disaster in history.
Figure 2. Tropical Cyclone Wilma, the globe's first major tropical cyclone of 2011, as seen at 01:45 GMT on January 26. 2011 by NASA's Aqua satellite. Image credit: NASA.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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I remember the summer I spent teaching diving in Roatan. I lived next to Spooky Channel, at night we'd go out on the dock and look down and see bioluminescence, look up and see shooting stars and heat lightning. The heat lightning (whatever the real cause) used to occur when the sky was so clear you can see the milky way and you wouldn't think there were any clouds, then from one side of hte sky to the other, the sparks would start and suddenly all these enormous clouds would be visible. I don't know if the bioluminescence included the string-of-pearls glows, but we dove a lot at night and it was something else spectacular.
Five Warmest Years (Anomalies)
1st. 1998(+0.37°C), 2nd. 2010(+0.36°C), 3rd. 2005(+0.32°C), 4th. 2009,2006,2003,2002(+0.31°C)
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/ann_wld.html
Link
Yea he was my professor at A&M.
Really that Onion spoof~ good info? lol My favorite parts was the NWS dude declaring it a cat 5, F4, and Level 7 redemptive act of God.. 15' of snow in TN & the second landfall on FL to wipe out the 4 remaining cities..
Here's the link in case anyone needs a good morning laugh. I think it referred to that storm that near 1/2 circled the globe & was partially blamed for el Nino being so strong. I want to say it started with a T, guy name?..2008, out of the WPAC..diving me crazy, can't remember it's name.
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