The heavy rain and strong wind from overnight has moved out but it left behind a lot of water and some wind damage as well. Wind gusts were strongest on the coast, where winds gusted over 50 mph. All things considered it turned out pretty well. The wind gusts peaked where we thought they would, but the power outages weren’t as high as we anticipated, a welcomed gift for many of us waking up this morning.
Rain was the other big story, being measured in inches this morning for everyone. Many towns picked up 2-3 inches of rain, with a few towns exceeding 4 inches!
While the rain has wrapped up, all the water takes some time to be swept up into the waterways. River flood warnings are in place for many rivers in Massachusetts, as indicated by all the lime green boxes. Rivers are expected to crest in the coming days. First the smaller rivers and streams will rise and crest. As those waterways return to normal, that water goes into the bigger rivers so those likely won’t crest for a few days.
As the rain moved in yesterday evening, it brought in a surge of warm air with it. In fact, it was cold enough at the beginning of the storm that a few areas (generally the higher elevations) started off as snow before flipping over to rain. The temperatures were completely backward over the last 24 hours. During the overnight hours, as we typically cool off, temperatures surged from the 40s to the 50s by this morning. Then, when we’d typically warm up, we’ve been cooling down (slowly) all afternoon long.
Thankfully we’ll get a few days to dry out with mostly sunny to partly cloudy skies returning for the end of the week. We’ll hold the breeze for tomorrow, though it won’t be as windy as today was. The wind will really back off for Friday under lots of sunshine.
And we are certainly in a pattern change with storms moving through every couple of days, and we’ll hold that pattern for a bit longer. So while we have two dry days to finish the week, our next storm arrives Friday night and Saturday morning. There will be a lot of similarities to the one we just had… some wind on the coast, initially coming in as a rain/snow mix, but by and large it’s a rain storm to kick off the weekend.
