Watch Hurricane Maria on Outer Banks, buoy webcams
ORIGINAL BLOG 9/25/2017:
Hurricane Maria is making a close pass to the North Carolina Outer Banks this week but is headed straight for a buoy webcam right now. NDBC station #41424 is a water-level (tsunami) station (no weather sensors), but it does have a webcam and Hurricane Maria is heading straight for it.
The image above shows a shot from the camera at 11 a.m. today. Select images from the last 24 hours are available on my Facebook page. The image below is the latest image from the buoy -- the camera updates every 30 to 60 minutes.
Yesterday, the storm moved over Buoy #41047, providing a crazy webcam snap during waves that had just fallen from over 40 feet (one of the highest wave readings I've seen this season). Winds also gusted to over 70 knots.
Soon, Hurricane Maria (wind gusts shown below courtesy WindyTY.com) will start to affect the Outer Banks, which took a hit from Hurricane Jose last week. Maria's northward movement will put her close enough to the coast to cause high winds, heavy rain, beach erosion and huge waves on the North Carolina Outer Banks and the Virginia Beach area.
The Outer Banks has a number of fairly high-resolution coastal DOT webcams -- a couple of their live images are shown below and you can get many more North Carolina coast webcams on my website. You can see from the first shot, which is just south of the new new Bonner Bridge, that they built up huge sand dunes after Hurricane Jose, which cut right across the road, covering it in sand and temporarily closing it.
The size difference between Maria (which is really losing its tropical characteristics) and Hurricane Lee, far right in the image below, is astounding, but that's what happens to tropical systems when they convert to extratropical -- they get bigger and spread out their weaker winds over a larger area.
