Weather- August 2010

[TheOnionMan]

Mark - At least you are on the west side of the track of Hurricane Earl!

Surfers are swarming our beaches as waves are to 3m high, that's caused by the passing of H. Danielle to our south a few days ago.  Water temp is circa 22c.  It's smoking hot here, 30c yesterday and today, I was inland yesterday and it was 33c. Last night's low here was 24c, very unusual for the coast and felt quite tropical - scent of flowers was overwhelming.  Seems like the perfect scenario for Hurricane hit.  Desperately needing the rain.

Let's hope this nasty one veers further east as they are hinting today.

johnw

This tracking of this Category 4 hurricane keeps changing; at some point today they were predicted a straight landfall hit on Nova Scotia, the latest is that it might actually go more west and hit landfall at Providence, Rhode Island (60 miles due south of here!), which points the storm directly at us.  The National Weather Service still has Nova Scotia as a direct hit on Saturday afternoon, with sustained winds of 74-110 mph.  There is still talk of a major west-to-east weather front that, depending on timing, may push the hurricane further east out to sea; let's hope that is the case.

Next two days is dedicated to batten down the hatches, starting with my Mom's house tomorrow, to secure all garden/yard furniture, BBQ grilles, trash barrels, anything that can become airborne.  John, you probably need to do the same!  Meanwhile, the heat continues, 95 F (35 C) today, tonight it is still 79 F (26 C), so leaving the air conditional on all night.  Predicted high for the next two days is 98-99 F (37 C).  I agree John, the extra warm air, and warming ocean temperatures, are cited as contributing to the intensity of this hurricane.

[Anthony Darby]

What's a trash barrel?

[arillady]

A rubbish bin Anthony I should imagine.
Thank goodness we don't get proper hurricanes here in South Oz - the occasional big blow rarely.
It is hard to believe that you are getting such high temps in your part of the world

[johnw]

Mark - Air conditioning?  I don't know of a single house here with it.

Yes we will start battening down the hatches tomorrow.  We remember Juan in 2003 that came ashore right at Halifax.  A 22 year old Cornus florida from Weston Nurseries in the yard was pulled bareroot from the ground and landed in the neighbor's yard 2 doors up the street.  The power was off for 13 days.

The local Hurricane Centre - which by the way had to be evacuated in Juan - says Earl will go straight up the Bay Of Fundy. Those to its immediate south and east will get the worst of it.  This is almost the same scenario as Juan, it too had a low pressure front coming in from the west at the same time.  That gave us an additional 4 inches of rain a couple of hours after the Juan devastation!

I heard on the radio this morning there has been ocean seas smoke at night, warmer than the air in many parts of the province.

Fingers crossed.

johnw

[Martin Baxendale]

Fingers crossed for you John and Mark.

[Anthony Darby]

Interesting they still call it a hurricane that far north.

[Maggi Young]

Interesting they still call it a hurricane that far north.

Why wouldn't they?

 Both Canada and USA have "National Hurricane Centres" ...... is it not only in the Indian Ocean and the Southern hemisphere that such storms are mostly referred to as cyclones  rather than hurricanes or typhoons?


 Best of luck to all those of you at risk from this fierce weather..... it has certainly stopped my typically British whinging about our weather ( well, for the moment, at least  )

[Ragged Robin]

It must be awful waiting and wondering, quite apart from all the preparation to make things as safe as possible   Good luck John & McMark and anyone else in the hurricane path, thinking of you.

[angie]

Hope all will be ok, I can imagine how scary it must be.
We have a forrest behind us and I couldn't believe how trees could just fall over and I remember the noise of the trees cracking after 8 hours of gale force winds there were twenty seven trees across the road, thank god they all fell the other way and not on top of the house.
I hope everything will be ok, my friends in Texas have had to board their house up so many times and she said it's the noise that is so scary.

Yes Maggi when you hear this it makes us stop moaning about our weather, gale force winds are bad enough I can't and wouldn't like to imagine what going through a hurricane would be like.

Take care

Angie

[TheOnionMan]

These hurricanes are part of the late summer and autumn season, but they typically follow other tracks making them of little concern in New England.  But watching the track can be disconcerting with the uncertainty, and the projected track ever changing.  The latest projection has it just catching the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts (the brunt of the storm missing us), but once again showing St. John, Nova Scotia New Brunswick in a direct path.  For those wondering, a hurricane is classified as such when sustained winds of a tropical storm are "greater than 64 knots (74 miles per hour; 119 kilometers per hour per hour), according to the Beaufort scale".  Hurricanes almost always go north.

[Anthony Darby]

Interesting they still call it a hurricane that far north.

Why wouldn't they?

 Both Canada and USA have "National Hurricane Centres" ...... is it not only in the Indian Ocean and the Southern hemisphere that such storms are mostly referred to as cyclones  rather than hurricanes or typhoons?


 Best of luck to all those of you at risk from this fierce weather..... it has certainly stopped my typically British whinging about our weather ( well, for the moment, at least   )

I just assumed that a hurricane was defined as a storm of that force passing through the Caribbean and once it had left the tropics, regardless of whether the winds remained hurricane force or not, it was no longer called a hurricane. A bit like Michael Fish saying there will not be a hurricane tonight - the night when Sevenoaks in Kent became two oaks. I can see from Mark's tracking pic that there is no reason not to call it a hurricane if it is still a b****y great big circular storm of a certain magnitude.

[johnw]

Interesting they still call it a hurricane that far north.

And this is why Anthony - a few shots of our street the morning after Juan, 29 September 2003...

Mark - the hottest day I have ever witnessed here 33c here though our shaded thermometers in the yard read 37. I may sleep in the car tonight (with air-conditioning).  You may mean Saint John, New Brunswick.

johnw

[David Nicholson]

..... Best of luck to all those of you at risk from this fierce weather..... it has certainly stopped my typically British whinging about our weather ( well, for the moment, at least  )

I shall forever stop whinging too (well I wont really)  Best of luck John and Mark keep safe.

Bet we get the tail end of this lot sometime next week. (there you go, another whinge!)

[TheOnionMan]

Mark - the hottest day I have ever witnessed here 33c here though our shaded thermometers in the yard read 37. I may sleep in the car tonight (with air-conditioning).  You may mean Saint John, New Brunswick.

johnw

Dang, my dyslexic tendencies again it doing.... I mean, doing it again.  Just got back from the neighbors pool, somehow the 94 C temperature today doesn't feel so bad.

David, looked up "whinging", hadn't heard that one before. I now have my daily quota of learning something new  
British : to complain fretfully : whine

[cohan]

..... Best of luck to all those of you at risk from this fierce weather..... it has certainly stopped my typically British whinging about our weather ( well, for the moment, at least  )

I shall forever stop whinging too (well I wont really)  Best of luck John and Mark keep safe.

Bet we get the tail end of this lot sometime next week. (there you go, another whinge!)

maggi and david--perhaps you could use the phrase i often comfort myself and others with in this area-- : "We get a lot of miserable  but not much deadly" (of course you might disagree about our cold weather being deadly but far fewer people die in the cold here than in the heat down south!)

john and mark--best of luck with this, they were just talking about it on the national news.. they mentioned a 10% chance that it will be as bad in nova scotia as juan was....