As of 11:00 this morning, Helene officially hit hurricane status and is expected to rapidly strengthen to a major hurricane before making landfall in Florida tomorrow evening. Now, I don’t want to sleep on the rain coming our way for your Thursday either. The takeaway is pack your umbrella with scattered showers and downpours through much of the day. The first few hours after sunrise may end up dry but I think by 10am the wet weather will arrive. Chris Lambert talked about Thursday’s rain in his blog this morning, which you can find here. For this blog, I’m going to focus my attention to the incoming Hurricane Helene and the widespread impacts.
As of this blog (4pm), Helene maintains category 1 strength with 80 mph winds and gusts to 100 mph. The satellite picture below shows much more of a hurricane look than what it looked like yesterday at this time, and that points to the rapid intensification that is expected. With little to no land mass in the way and water temperatures primed for hurricane fuel, there’s really nothing stopping Helene… except landfall.
The official track from the National Hurricane Center brings Helene to category 2 level by this evening as she enters the Gulf. From there, the storm quickly climbs to category 3 by tomorrow morning. As the storm races off to the north, the forecast is for Helene to make landfall as a category 3 storm, a major hurricane, in the Big Bend of Florida on Thursday evening. I want to point out not only does the storm make landfall as a major hurricane, but it’s expected to maintain tropical storm strength as far inland as Atlanta! Remember that, that will come back into the conversation later…
Hurricane Helene is a massive storm. Yes in strength, but also in size. The wind field around the eye of the storm is massive. In fact as the hurricane passes by Florida, you’ll notice the tropical storm force wind (the yellow bubble) encompasses the entire state of Florida! So while the strongest of the wind and landfall will be on the Florida panhandle, the entire state is bracing for tropical storm force wind! Simply for perspective, when Irma hit Ft. Myers back in 2017, it had an expansive wind field like this and about 2/3 of the state lost power.
For the west coast of Florida, the story is the surge! The storm will push an incredible amount of ocean water onto land. This is separate from the rain that falls. In the Big Bend where the wind will not only push that water north on the land, but the curve of the state will focus it into one area, up to 18 feet of water is possible! But the 5+ foot surge will extend all the way south to Tampa and beyond.
Then there’s the rain. We talk about this often when we get remnant tropical moisture in New England. A tropical system brings tropical rains, and this storm is no different. Widespread rain amounts of 4-10″ are possible in the southeastern United States with localized totals over a foot! That is a lot of rain on it’s own, but that amount of rain in a huge metropolitan area (Atlanta) along with tropical storm force wind (remember that from earlier) is a huge concern there. As the tropical rain moves north, the issue becomes the terrain. Once you get into northern Georgia and the western Carolinas, you get into the mountains. A foot of rain in mountainous terrain is a recipe for disaster. We saw this on a smaller scale last September when we had a foot of rain in the hilly terrain in Leominster and the destruction that it caused. We’ve also seen this play out the last couple of years with disastrous flooding in Vermont and New Hampshire with tropical rains in complex terrain. Hurricane Helene is going to have far reaching impacts the next few days even well beyond where she’s expected to make landfall.
