September 20th Update

Tropical Storm Jose is delivering a glancing blow, as expected, to New England. The storm will linger east of Nantucket for several days, and that will keep it breezy to windy through the end of the workweek. The storm’s exact track determines whether we get to enjoy sunshine or clouds Thursday through Saturday. It looks like the storm will be far enough away on Sunday to allow for an unseasonable warm-up on the first weekend of Summer. It could be a bonus beach and pool day, with temperature soaring into the 80s. The record high in Providence is only 87° (1959), and it’s within reach. Jose’s remnants could drift a little farther north than currently projected, and that would kill the warm-up.

Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico Wednesday morning as a category 4 hurricane with 155 mph wind. Videos of massive river flooding and storm damage are already arriving on social media. Let’s hope it’s not a total disaster for the island. Maria will move north of Puerto Rico this afternoon to east of the Bahamas by the start of the weekend. The long-range forecast for Maria is uncertain, but the consensus is a track like Jose that threatens the East Coast, but does not make landfall.

I was confident in fringe effects from Jose after digging through the history books and seeing Edouard’s track in 1996. That hurricane whipped Cape Cod and the Islands, but did not do much in RI or interior SE MA. Jose was expected to be in a similar spot as a weaker storm, and the impact would be the same or less. No two storms are identical, but there is something to be learned from looking at past events. Tropical systems moving into the cooler water off the Northeast coast typically do not have a large area of very rough weather on their northwest side. This is the case with Jose, and if Maria follows in its wake, hopefully, the hype machine is turned down a notch.