Melissa is now a category 5 “major” hurricane located just to the south of Jamaica and continues to drift to the west over some very warm water of the central Caribbean Sea. Hurricane Melissa will begin a gradual turn to the northwest and then north by later tonight and likely come ashore on Jamaica’s southern coast on Tuesday morning. After that, the hurricane will push in a northeasterly direction and pass over the eastern part of Cuba by early Wednesday – likely still as a major - and then likely the southeastern Bahama Islands by late Wednesday. By later Thursday, Melissa could come very close to the island of Bermuda as it picks up some forward speed and continues on a northeasterly direction...eventually bringing it out to the open waters of the North Atlantic.
Meanwhile, an active weather pattern over the continental US will feature a deepening upper-level trough by mid-week over the Tennessee Valley and this will help to spawn a strong surface-level storm system. This strong storm will likely produce a soaking event for the Mid-Atlantic region from later Wednesday through Thursday night with 2+ inches on the table, and onshore winds will be a noticeable factor as well. The rain may linger for a bit on Friday morning, but the bulk of Halloween Day should feature partial sunshine and quite windy and cool conditions.
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The last time a hurricane hit New England with hurricane-strength winds was Hurricane Bob on August 19, 1991. It made landfall in Rhode Island as a Category 2 hurricane, causing significant damage, loss of life, and coastal erosion across southern New England. For many decades prior, New England was directly hit by a hurricane on a regular basis averaging about one every 7 years or so. Yesterday, September 21, marked the 87th anniversary of one of the most destructive and powerful hurricanes in recorded history that struck Long Island and Southern New England. The storm has been referred to in different ways including "The Great New England Hurricane of 1938" or "The Long Island Express" or the "Yankee Clipper".
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At the end of the 19th century, America was beaming with confidence and feeling bigger and stronger than ever before. The city of Galveston, Texas was booming with a population of 37,000 residents on the east end of Galveston Island which runs about thirty miles in length and anywhere from one and a half to three miles in width. Its position on the harbor of Galveston Bay along the Gulf of Mexico made it the center of trade and the biggest city in Texas in the year 1900. A quarter of a century earlier, a nearby town was destroyed by a powerful hurricane and this object lesson was heeded by many Galveston residents and talks of a seawall to protect the city were quite prevalent. However, no seawall was built and sand dunes along the shore were actually cut down to fill low areas in the city, removing what little barrier there was to the Gulf of Mexico. This proved to be a fatal mistake for the city of Galveston in what nobody could foresee happening to this magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf of Mexico.
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On September 1st, 1859, a ferocious solar storm took place that impacted much of the planet. This ferocious solar storm is now known as the “Carrington Event”, named after the British astronomer, Richard Carrington, who witnessed the largest solar flare from his own private observatory which caused a major coronal mass ejection (CME) to travel directly toward Earth. Recent studies of solar storms have warned that these type of “Carrington Events” may not be quite as rare as once thought (e.g., Hayakawa et al). Many previous studies leaned heavily on Western Hemisphere accounts, omitting data from the Eastern Hemisphere. A super storm of the same magnitude as the “Carrington Event” in today’s world would very likely have a much more damaging impact than it did in the 19th century potentially causing widespread power outages along with disruptions to navigation, air travel, banking, and all forms of digital communication.
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In a movie filled with memorable quotes, one of the shortest and simplest might have been “It’s a Twister!”, but it was part of a tornado scene that is still considered to be a classic more than eight decades later. August 25, 1939 was the official release date of the “Wizard of Oz" which was the first movie to depict an authentic looking tornado using improbable “1930’s style” special effects. Through the decades, this all-time classic has inspired movie-goers and “weather weenies” alike with the scene of a twister lifting Dorothy’s home into the sky over rural Kansas farm land.
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1969 was a remarkable year and will be long remembered as the year when man first walked on the moon, the Miracle Mets shocked the sports world, and the Woodstock Festival took place in upstate New York. It will also be remembered as the year when a major hurricane –Hurricane Camille – struck the United States as a category 5 storm and the second most intense tropical cyclone on record (only the 1935 Labor Day hurricane had a lower central pressure at landfall). Hurricane Camille made landfall in Mississippi and wreaked havoc from the Gulf States to as far inland as the Mid-Atlantic with widespread flooding, record rainfall, and it cost the lives of several hundreds of people along its path of destruction.
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The month of July so far has been warmer-than-normal across much of the nation, but it will certainly have a difficult time matching the extreme and sustained heat of July 1936. In fact, one of the most widespread and destructive heat waves ever recorded in the US took place in the summer of 1936 which fell right in the middle of arguably the hottest and driest decade ever for the nation.
The decade of the 1930’s is renowned for the “Great Depression” and the “Dust Bowl”, both of which caused calamitous human suffering in this country. Not only were huge numbers of crops destroyed by the heat and lack of moisture in the “Dust Bowl” era, but thousands of lives were lost as a result of the heat, drought and economic hardship. This extreme heat wave was particularly deadly in high population areas where air conditioning was still in the early stages of development. The heat wave experienced in 1936 began in late June, reached a peak in July, and didn’t really come to an end until September. Many of the all-time high temperature records that were set in the 1930’s in numerous cities and states still stand today.
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The high temperature later today at the Furnace Creek Visitor’s Center in Death Valley National Park, California will be around 120°F and while this is extremely hot, it will be well short of the observation there on this date in 1913. On July 10th, 1913, the weather observer at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley recorded a high temperature of 134°F and one hundred and twelve years later, this is still the highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. In addition to this all-time and worldwide high temperature record, the wild weather year of 1913 produced numerous other extreme events.
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Nowadays, when the people of New Orleans think of devastating hurricanes they think of Katrina, but before 2005, the most notorious storm name in Louisiana was Audrey. Sixty-eight years ago from Friday, Hurricane Audrey slammed into the southwest coast of Louisiana and became the strongest June hurricane and earliest major (category 3) to make landfall in the US. Hurricane Audrey killed hundreds of people – estimated to be somewhere between 400 and 500 - including many of whom to this day remain unidentified and tragically, about one-third of those were children. The high number of deaths - in an era without satellite imagery - were attributed to the storm moving ashore earlier and stronger than predicted while most people were sleeping.
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The official Atlantic Basin tropical season was barely underway in June of 1972 when a polar front interacted with an upper-level trough of low pressure over the Yucatan Peninsula. Within a few days, a tropical depression formed and the system moved slowly eastward and emerged in the western Caribbean Sea by the middle of the month. The depression began to intensify over the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea and soon became Tropical Storm Agnes – the first named storm of the 1972 tropical season. Ultimately, Agnes would reach hurricane status, grow to a diameter of about 1000 miles, and become the costliest hurricane at the time to hit the US and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the prime focus of its wrath.
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