00:00Well, we have our eye on the East Coast as a new coastal storm will be organizing and lurking for
00:07most of the end of the weekend through much of the next week. And this comes three weeks after
00:12the nor'easter that impacted many areas in a very severe way. It has become about three and a half
00:18weeks at the pinnacle of this event after the significant nor'easter that impacted areas back
00:23on the final full weekend of the month of September. At least it was around the weekend
00:31of the 26th or so and 27th when this storm made significant impacts in late September.
00:37All right, let's take a look at what's going on. I'm going to take you right to the surface
00:41and precipitation forecast here to show how this gets going. Overall, here we are late
00:46tonight into early Saturday morning and our cold front is going to be moving through the
00:53northeast here and pulling offshore by now. And again, with our front through the coast
01:00and moving offshore, we're going to be dealing with a zone of lower pressure. But here's the
01:06deal. This weekend, an area of strong high pressure lurking far offshore, closer to an
01:14area a little east of Bermuda, it's going to kind of press pause on the eastward progression
01:18of the front. So the trough is going to split and the front gets hung up in such a way
01:23that,
01:24well, we're going to see low pressure form and basically it just gets stalled there. And
01:29a new area of low pressure is going to organize just offshore, a couple hundred miles off the
01:35Carolina coast. So as this sets up and this area of high pressure acts almost like a linebacker
01:42backer just blocking it from moving out into the central Atlantic, this front that stalls and the
01:48trough that splits is going to be the breeding ground for a new area of low pressure to organize.
01:55And watch as this organize here, we have 1011 pressure, which is not that low. It's a very,
02:00very weak area of lower pressure along the trough accompanying the front. And then you pass forward
02:05to Sunday and here we have, we're down to 1006. So this is going to strengthen maybe five millibars in
02:10that
02:10timeframe from our cold front to a strengthening independent low pressure system. And then it's
02:17not going to be as strong as the nor'easter that we had three weeks ago, but it will be
02:21a persistent
02:22zone of low pressure spinning in the next week. And just to give you, before I go too far forward,
02:27a comparison, here's 8 p.m. Monday. This is Monday evening with the GFS, a 10.05 low. Here's the
02:35NAM.
02:35NAM. The NAM is a little farther south and not as strong, but the message here is that there is
02:42still
02:42a zone of low pressure that spins up and it produces some decent rain there in the Eastern
02:45Carolinas, but an onshore wind, even though it's not that strong of a storm, the NAM is producing a
02:52strong gradient. Sometimes it's not about the strength of the storm system. It's about the pressure
02:57gradient. When you look at a storm system in conjunction with strong, this is a 1030 high to the
03:03north at a modestly strong low pressure system. Even if the low itself is not terribly strong,
03:09the pressure gradient is strong. Tightly packed isobars because of strong high pressure to the
03:14north. So even in the NAM, even though it's not that strong of a storm system, the European and
03:19the GFS, by the way, are in lockstep with one another as a 10.05 low. It's a different placement,
03:24but similar intensity. Again, in either case, whether the contrast is driven by the high pressure to the
03:31north or the low pressure system all by itself, the pressure gradient is what drives that onshore
03:35wind. So the message here is that as the weekend takes over and then into the early next week,
03:39an area of low pressure will be lurking offshore. And we're going to have this tight gradient with
03:44many isobars, several of them hinting at a strong pressure gradient between strong high pressure over
03:50the Great Lakes and low pressure offshore. I can clean this up for you. I'll just show you a kind
03:54of a
03:54schematic. Here is our area of low pressure on Monday with rain brushing the coast of the mid
04:00Atlantic with delightfully bright dry weather over the Appalachians, by the way. This is just a coastal
04:05storm. And here we're just kind of simplifying that conversation about that contrast. High pressure
04:10to the north, strong high pressure there, developing modestly strong low pressure offshore. The gradient
04:17is what drives the bus. And here you have, again, you're going from 10.30 to maybe 10.05.
04:23So a strong contrast in millibars there. And that's going to drive a strong onshore wind.
04:30What's that do? That leads to coastal flooding and erosion. So here we have wave heights. And watch
04:35as we go from not that much wave action, four, five, six foot wave heights to a strengthening area
04:41of low pressure offshore. I can plot this. And on the northwest side of that, where the gradient is
04:47strong. In fact, while I'm doing this, I might as well put the H on there too. While the gradient
04:52is
04:52strong, you could see that that thatch, direction of wind over many miles, over water, it produces
04:59these 18 to 17 foot wave heights off of the Virginia Beach Coast. So as we simplify it here,
05:06Saturday night, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, every high tide cycle is going to bring new rounds of
05:11coastal flooding. North Carolina Route 12, they've been working hard to clean up from three weeks ago.
05:16Well, we're going to be dealing with some more coastal flooding there. Shouldn't be as bad as last
05:19time probably, but it will be impactful with 40 to 60 mile per hour gusts off and on for several
05:23days.
05:24And if we look at the modeling, lots of options here. Here we have our wind gusts. Now this is
05:31in
05:31knots, but I'm going to press pause. Here's a 48 knot wind Monday morning. 48 knots would put us into
05:37the mid-50s, 55 mile per hour winds or so. And here's a 46 knot wind with the NAM and
05:45then with the
05:45European similar. But what I'm more impressed by with the European is the persistence. Here we have
05:51a 47 knot wind on Sunday, 49 knot wind on Monday night, 43 knot wind on Tuesday night, 43 knot
06:00wind
06:00Wednesday night. So we got day after day of strong wind. And you know, that's going to be expensive
06:04when it comes to the coastal erosion. There's also going to be some secondary impacts along the Florida
06:09coast, the east side. Here we have 20 to 30 foot or 20 to 30 mile per hour winds. We're
06:15a little more
06:15removed from the core of that onshore wind. And you know, if the center of the storm is over that
06:22relatively warm water long enough, if the core of it can transition from cold core, like a nor'easter,
06:28like what we had three weeks ago, to a warm core system, it could get the name Josephine. It could
06:33become a subtropical or tropical system. But again, it's not looking likely that it becomes a true
06:39tropical system. Water temps, if we were to kind of throttle this down to where it's warm enough to
06:43support true tropical development, 79 degrees is often the threshold. We're going to be close to
06:48that area with that area of low pressure.
