Tropical Storm Nicole made landfall today in the Bahamas and continues to track westward toward Florida will it will make another landfall overnight tonight. The current forecast from the National Hurricane Center is for Nicole to strengthen to a category 1 hurricane before making landfall north of West Palm Beach tonight.

From there Nicole will weaken fairly quickly, back to a tropical storm by tomorrow afternoon and then to a depression and then a remnant low as it turns and heads north later in the week.

By the time Nicole gets to South Carolina, Nicole will no longer exist. But the moisture from Nicole will get sucked up into another area of low pressure moving in from the Great Lakes. After joining forces the storm will push east through the northeast and into England. Again, to stress, we are not getting hit by Nicole in any form, though we will see some rain and gusty winds Friday night and Saturday morning.

As these remnant tropical systems fall apart, they typically get broken in two parts: instead of a tropical system that produces rain and wind, we usually see one half of the storm produce wind and one half of the storm produce the heavy rain. The western side of the storm produces the heaviest rain while the eastern side produces the strongest wind gusts.

For us, it looks like we’ll thread the needle almost perfectly. Where we will see some rain and we will see some wind. But we won’t see the highest rain totals (2-4″) nor will we see the highest wind gusts of 55-65 mph. I think most of us are in line for 1-2″ of rain and a majority of us will be on the lower end of that, near 1″ with isolated spots getting closer to 2″. Wind gusts will be highest on the Cape and South Coast. The coastal flood risk is low as winds are from the south and there isn’t much of an onshore component aside from the Cape and the tides are approaching astronomically low.

With pockets of heavy rain and a lot of leaves down and likely some clogged storm drains, I do think some localized street flooding is likely. So if you can, clear out the storm drains of any debris by Friday midday.

Between now and Friday night, we have two more nice days. Sunshine will be back tomorrow with mild temperatures as highs climb to the 60s. Again you’ll notice a good breeze tomorrow, but that is the warmer air pushing in. We’ll continue to warm by Friday as many of us have another shot at 70° both Friday and Saturday.

Join our Newsletter for the latest news right to your inbox