Steve signing in at 8:32 AM. 25 years ago on this date, around 7:30 AM, the center of Hugo entered the southeast corner of Burke County, passing over George Hildebrand and probably the mountain before crossing I-40 somewhere near the 110 mile marker, passing over Drexel then just west of the Foothills Airport. At 8:00 AM, Hugo, downgraded to a 65 mph tropical storm was located somewhere near Brown Mountain Beach Resort in Caldwell County about 10 miles west of Collettsville. About an hour before daybreak, Charlotte reported near 100 mph winds gust and Hickory was reporting gusts to 80 mph. The winds could actually have been higher since Hickory Regional only reported on current weather every two hours at that time. Hugo continued northward into Boone, briefly entering northeastern Tennessee before continuing into West Virginia, Ohio and eventually eastern Canada. As far away as Prince Edward Island north of Nova Scotia, a station reported a 77 mph wind gust from what was then post-tropical Hugo. There are some, but not many, parallels to Hugo, where landfalling tropical systems interact with non-tropical features such as troughs or fronts. The most recent has been Hurricane Ike, which spread hurricane force wind gusts as far inland as Louisville Kentucky, Columbus Ohio and even upstate New York. Likewise, Hurricane Hazel, which for most if not all of her over land life was not a hurricane at all but an extremely strong post-tropical storm, spread hurricane force winds over nearly all of eastern Pennsylvania and central New York with hurricane force gusts reported in Toronto, Canada. I think an interesting field of study may eventually be cases where landfalling tropical systems go wrong, where instead of rapidly weakening like the textbooks say they should, instead they maintain steady-state or weaken more slowly because theyre propped up by influences from nearby baroclinic (non-tropical) systems. Getting back to todays weather, there are no hurricanes in sight. In fact my latest check of the tropics indicated nothing going on at all. Well see two, maybe three mainly sunny and pleasantly cool early fall days this week but by later Wednesday, clouds and moisture start to work their way into western North Carolina. Highs today should rebound from the low and mid 50s currently across the 4 county area to the mid 70s this afternoon and low to mid 70s through Wednesday. Afterwards, with more cloud cover, temperatures may not even make it to 70° on Thursday with a slight chance of rain from a system moving northward through eastern North Carolina. Upslope moisture from easterly winds could continue the cloud cover into the weekend with intermittent periods of rain and drizzle possible. By late Sunday into Monday, a weak but wet system from the Gulf of Mexico may pass just to our west, bringing more concentrated rains into the western Carolinas. It looks like well be on the right side of this system at the moment so depending on what type of cool air wedge is still in place, we could see a few thunderstorms also.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:54:32 +0000
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