Much of Maine, as well as parts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, will face impacts from Hurricane Lee. How will it compare to storms that have taken a similar track before?
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00:00 This is an interesting storm.
00:01 Whenever these storms move into the New England states or the Canadian Maritimes, which is
00:05 not terribly uncommon, but it does happen, it becomes kind of an interesting storyline
00:11 as people often associate tropical systems with the tropics and those warmer climates.
00:15 And we want to talk to long-time AccuWeather meteorologist Dave Dombek about this.
00:20 Dave spends a lot of time forecasting in the northeastern U.S.
00:23 You may hear his voice from time to time on radio stations in the big markets in the northeast
00:28 as well.
00:29 Dave, thanks again for joining us.
00:31 Absolutely, my pleasure.
00:33 Well, Dave, Hurricane Lee is still churning.
00:36 Right now it's only moving at six miles per hour, still a Category 3 storm.
00:41 But the future of this will behave a little differently as we're going to see this accelerate
00:45 into the New England states.
00:46 So just off the bat, where are you most concerned about the impacts of rain, wind, and also
00:51 storm surge flooding for the area around New England and perhaps parts of the northeast?
00:57 Well, I think this graphic, Jeff, really points it out very well.
01:02 And there will be a sharp gradation in both the wind speeds and any rain that does fall.
01:07 Certainly you're looking at around Cape Cod, Boston area, and on eastward and northeastward
01:12 from there.
01:13 So certainly down east Maine is our biggest concern, and into Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia
01:18 certainly seems to be right in the main path there and parts of New Brunswick.
01:24 But even some local effects, depending on the wind direction for a time, that area around
01:29 Boston Harbor, down into that notch in Cape Cod, if the winds are northeast for a time,
01:35 you get a good fetch.
01:36 That could be an area where the water could pile up and you could have some issues down
01:39 in there as well.
01:40 And certainly we're looking at a lot of wind.
01:42 On the back side of the west side of this storm track here, there's going to be everything
01:47 lined up quite well with the wind.
01:50 And so we could be looking at gusts, perhaps even back as far as Montauk Point out on Long
01:55 Island, east end of Long Island, gusts to 50 miles per hour or so.
02:01 And a forecast is always kind of a living, breathing thing from day to day, shift to
02:05 shift, even hour to hour.
02:06 We're always looking at things with a new lens as best we can.
02:10 So where do we stand today compared to maybe 24 hours ago with our confidence that we're
02:14 going to have trouble in eastern Maine versus maybe the Jersey Shore?
02:19 I would say definitely a higher confidence today.
02:22 You know, as we go forward, areas along the coast, we've been able to kind of, if you
02:29 will, ax it off as far as like our concern.
02:31 Like we've pretty much eliminated in Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, the Delmarva, the
02:37 Jersey Shore, you're going to get some effects, certainly with rip currents all along the
02:41 eastern seaboard.
02:42 That's going to be an issue for at least a couple of days and some rough surf.
02:46 There'll be some wind effect down along the Jersey Shore, but from there southward, we're
02:50 quite confident that we're not worried about any kind of really direct effects from Lee.
02:56 But as you go farther north, the concern is still there and we're very worried, like I
03:01 said, parts of Maine and into Atlantic Canada.
03:05 And we showed at the top of this hit the eye path here for Lee, and we're explicitly forecasting
03:11 a landfall, most likely in Nova Scotia, but perhaps again, as we look at some of the different
03:16 model guidance and so forth, there's a chance this could still come in as far west as Maine.
03:21 But the coastline is very different in parts of Maine compared to, say, along the coast
03:27 of Florida.
03:28 So we want to talk about that, but I also want to talk to you a little bit about the
03:32 history of New England hurricanes from the 1900s.
03:35 We've had many of these.
03:36 It's been a little while, but what are some of those memorable storms that jump out to
03:40 you when we think about historical New England hurricanes?
03:42 Well, I guess the big one, you know, the benchmark one, Jeff, in the last 100 years or so would
03:50 have to be the 1938 hurricane.
03:52 This is before hurricanes were actually named.
03:55 That was a very devastating hurricane.
03:57 It came, you could see the path there, a very devastating pathway that came in from like
04:01 the south, southeast and all on that east flank.
04:05 A good portion of New England was in the really dangerous quadrant of that storm.
04:11 And just some statistics on that, 700 deaths, the winds up to over 120 mile per hour gusts,
04:18 some peak wave heights up to 50 feet, 8,900 buildings were destroyed and 2 billion trees
04:26 were knocked down from that storm.
04:28 That's one of the most memorable ones in the last 100 years.
04:32 As far as recent memory, the last one to make a landfall in New England, Bob, Hurricane
04:38 Bob Category 2, and it was in 1991, in August of 1991.
04:44 A very memorable one for a lot of us who are working here at AccuWeather, some who were
04:49 in the New England states at that time.
04:51 And Bob, just briefly, how does the coastline, maybe the rocky nature of the coastline in
04:56 eastern Maine differ from that in Cape Cod and the relative risk?
04:59 How does that play out with these storms?
05:03 That's interesting.
05:04 It is a different situation and you do have rocky coast in that.
05:08 And of course you have colder water.
05:10 These storms, that's why you really can't maintain a powerful Category 5 or 4 or whatever
05:16 3 storm way northward because the water gets colder or cooler as you go northward.
05:21 So typically the storms, as far as their category is concerned, they wind down as far as they're
05:28 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but they're still very large and powerful storms.
05:34 And sometimes they transition into a hybrid system where they're trying to interact with
05:40 the mid-latitude trough and cold fronts and so forth, and they turn into a hybrid storm
05:44 and their effects tend to go out in a larger area.
05:48 Well, thank you very much for that insight there.
05:51 We appreciate that.
05:52 Dave Dabek here from AccuWeather.
05:53 with it.