Atlantic Hurricane season 2019

oy, spring hasn't even arrived yet

 

feels like we're in the middle of a 5 week nor'easter here

 

I was impressed that it did not spawn from a tropical depression between Africa and the Caribbean. It came from an ordinary low pressure system that wandered over the Gulf of Mexico and then turned on. This may be more common than I'm aware of but I found the origin interesting.

Bob Wilson

 

still time to move out!

 

perfect. we had some pretty good rain today, and more to come, unless they're wrong

 

We just took an incredible thunderstorm here in PA. My house has a moat now. Water in the basement. Neighbors going door to door checking on each other. Highway flooded over, traffic backed up, emergency vehicles seen swimming.

It’s draining now but wow that was really something else. Neighbor tells me it’s the worst he’s seen in 30+ years.

 

It is not that unusual for this time of year. The first tropical cyclones in the Atlantic season often form either in the gulf or off the US east coast, and are often triggered by spurious weather conditions. Later in the season, tropical cyclones typically form in the Caribbean - and even later than that; off the African coast. What was unusual about Barry, was the bizarre track of the spurious low pressure system over land before it went out over the gulf to become a tropical cyclone. However, I do recall early predictions, when the low pressure system was over Georgia, that it might happen.

 

One prediction from the Climate models are abnormally high rainfall events in some areas because of the increased water evaporation. Counter intuitive, there will also be droughts in other areas.

Bob Wilson

 

I would tend to agree. Both higher rainfall and droughts will occur. Individually, both are short term events. The droughts, however, are difficult to document as causally related to climate change over the long term (30 years). The increased rainfall, on the other hand, should be easy to document as such. Not that I think they will necessarily continue to increase. I believe that the rainfall we are experiencing now is the "new normal".

 

Climate change?

Bob Wilson

 

Our hay crop took a very serious hit last week with just 2 inches of hail accumulation (at least -- the tub used as ad hoc gauge was tilted and overflowing), knocking our best fields nearly flat. Largest stones in the 1" to 1.25" range, though the bulk in the 0.5-0.75" range. We heard that a section of nearby highway, on the other side of a ridge, had 6", so the road dept pulled out a snowplow.

But apparently the core path was under a mile wide. Neighbor fields just a mile north had far less, places three miles north had only light rain, while others east and west were hit similarly hard as us, one home suffering lots of broken windows and siding. (We lost a single barn pane, but those are cheap and weak compared to house windows.) There are no homes or fields to the south, but an acquaintance using a horse trail the next day found the edges of the main destruction path to be under a mile apart. Tree and brush leaves half stripped, lots of fruit knocked down, ditches still full of hail a day later.

The crop destruction was worse than dad (80+) could remember, but matches a 1920s event that his dad described.

If 2 inches can do this, I can't image what 1 meter of hail can do.