Unnamed Coastal Storm Floods Southeast Coast
UPDATE 9/25: Severe flooding in Columbia and a tornado in Charleston occurred after I wrote this blog.
Here's a time-lapse of the Columbia flooding from a USGS webcam yesterday:
ORIGINAL BLOG 9/24: Far be it from me to question the NOAA National Hurricane Center. They do a great job with tropical storms, but they are very particular about sticking to that and tend to turn a blind eye to storms that don't meet their strict definition, even if those storms are damaging.
Yesterday morning, they declared that the coastal storm had a "zero percent chance of developing" and overnight, they shut down the ATCF models that were tracking it. Fortunately, we have other models that track it, and they show this circulation going inland on the Georgia/South Carolina border:
Waking up and looking at the radar this morning, you might wonder why the storm off the Southeast Coast hasn't yet been named as a tropical system.
It clearly has a circulation on radar, and mesoanalysis, (see also 8 a.m. shot) and now (at 10 a.m.) is exhibiting a 1 millibar closed pressure center (see above).
Farther north, a tight pressure gradient between a strong high pressure system and this unnamed coastal storm (and astronomical conditions, i.e. Supermoon) is causing inland flooding. Check out these pictures from New Bern, North Carolina, which isn't even on the coast!
At Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, tides have been running above normal for days and are now over a foot up. The same is true for Duck, North Carolina. Severe erosion is occurring on the Outer Banks as well.
Despite the name or classification of the storm, it's clearly already causing damage and will continue to.
Our story talks about 16-foot waves offshore, 10-foot onshore, coastal flooding from South Carolina to Long Island and tides 2-3 feet above normal in North Carolina and Virginia.
A buoy near the storm this morning is showing 31-knot winds with pressure falling 0.10" Hg.
Wherever this, or other, circulations land, the storm is expected to bring heavy rain to somewhere -- probably the Carolinas; the ECMWF model shows up to 9 inches of rain:
The storm has had an interesting history. Tuesday morning, I posted an image of the storm -- noting winds were already up to 36 knots offshore, with waves over over 10 feet.
Tuesday afternoon, it had two circulation centers very near each other. The recurring and moving circulation centers do mean the storm is hard to forecast, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore it.
