Tonight and tomorrow, it’s going to rain like crazy around here. In the DC area, we’re expecting to get about three inches, with some significant probability of tropic storm force winds (sustained winds in excess of 39 MPH). My brother lives in the Tidewater area, and he’s right on the edge of the region where four to six inches of rain are expected. Along with maybe a four foot tidal surge. All from tropical storm Ophelia.
What I find odd about is that the very first mention of this disturbance was late yesterday morning. That’s based on a check of the archives at the the National Hurricane Center. The very first mention of Ophelia — the point at which it became a named tropical storm — was the forecast update as of late afternoon today.
Source: National Hurricane Center.
In short, the interval between this thing becoming a name tropical storm, and the start of the deluge, here in NoVA, is maybe eight hours. Plus or minus. Even worse, my brother in the Tidewater area got about 6 hours’ warning between the time Ophelia became a named storm, and the time that tropical-storm-force winds are expected to hit his area.
I don’t think the weather used to work this way. Either that, or my memory has become so clouded that I don’t recall the times this has occurred in the past.
I used to have a sailboat, down in Tidewater Virginia, a couple of hours’ drive from where I live. I spent many autumns tuned into the hurricane forecast for this area, because a major storm meant that I had to move the boat off its dock and moor it in the middle of the river. (Because, if you don’t, the storm surge floats your boat up and over the dock, at which point wave action destroys both the boat and the dock to which it is tied. So it’s not optional. It was written into the contract allowing me to use the dock.) This, along with everybody else who kept a boat at the same dock. It was quite a fire drill every time.
My recollection is that major tropical cyclones were well-anticipated events, and that you’re read about them for days before they made landfall. I’d have plenty of time to gear up, arrange time off work, and get the boat prepped for the oncoming storm.
I further recall that when a few such storms “popped up” in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago, without crossing the Atlantic first, that was news, meteorologically-speaking.
But maybe the short-cycling of tropical storms is now the new normal. Plausibly, this is brought about by elevated Atlantic Coast sea surface temperatures. Warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico got all the headlines with the most recent hurricane. But in fact, ocean water temperatures are a few degrees above historical averages all up and down the U.S. East Coast. And, apparently, a few degrees is all it takes to whirl up a tropical storm in a couple of days, flat.
And so, this went from literally nothing on the weather map, to landfall of a tropical storm, in just about exactly two days.
And, unlike those pop-up tropical depressions of a couple of years back, that doesn’t even seem to be triggering comment this time around.
It’s just the way the world works now. Having days of warning for a tropical storm landfall? That’s so last-century.
Get used to it.
All pictures here are from Gencraft.com AI. We never really did have a meeting of the minds over what I meant by “hurricane”.
