Grand Banks Big Daddy Cat 3 Storm

Many of you have been asking "Where are the big daddy storms this season?" We haven't had a decent Nor'easter dropping feet of snow on the Northeast (or any snow in the big cities in the Mid-Atlantic) since last winter. Well, the short (and depressing answer for you snow geese) is that the storms are still there, they are just too far off the coast to do us any good. The atmosphere hasn't stopped generating strong storms, but the storm track has shifted too far East.

Yesterday, pressure fell to Category 3 Hurricane levels near the Grand Banks at the "Tail of the Bank" buoy, and a nearby ship (who probably knew better than to be in the center of the storm) reported a slightly higher pressure. Here's the GFS analysis from 12Z yesterday:

Here are the locations of the readings shown below on Google Maps:

957.9 mb / 28.29" Hg - Report From Buoy #44140964 mb / 28.47" Hg - Category 3 Hurricane [WikiPedia]967 mb / 28.56" Hg - Report From Ship(Data From NDBC)

The buoy also reported 56 mph winds and waves 30 feet high! Here's what the storm looked like on satellite:

Thanks to blog reader Thomas for pointing this out. You can't see the numbers above on the NDBC site because they only keep data 24 hours, but here is a capture of the data Thomas emailed me. Here is the observation from the ship captured off NDBC's site: