2024 - tracking the tropics

[WxWatcher007]

52 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

Gloria…It was decent here in 85.   Best I’ve seen since.  Isaias wasn’t as good as Gloria here. But then again it shouldn’t have been cuz it wasn’t a Cane!  Gloria was legit here. The eye came right over us here. 

Nobody around here is truly ready for anything close to Gloria, let alone a legit high end 2 or major. It’s not hyperbolic to say that it won’t need to be a cat 4 behemoth to be catastrophic in New England. Though I guarantee some would even meh that.  
 

[Cyclone-68]

3 hours ago, WinterWolf said:

Gloria…It was decent here in 85.   Best I’ve seen since.  Isaias wasn’t as good as Gloria here. But then again it shouldn’t have been cuz it wasn’t a Cane!  Gloria was legit here. The eye came right over us here. 

Very true. I was admittedly being regionally biased to eastern MA

[Cyclone-68]

2 hours ago, CurlyHeadBarrett said:

Rate Gloria out of 8, with 4 being average

I have very little personal experience with these storms to make a decent judgement on a rating but it definitely didn’t reach the hype leading up to it where I lived just south of Boston. The days leading up to it were exciting though. First and only time my father boarded the windows 

[CoastalWx]

I thought Gloria was better than Bob here. Good amount of tree damage and no power for several days. 
 

 Bob was a big disappointment outside of extreme SE MA.

[kdxken]

30 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

I thought Gloria was better than Bob here. Good amount of tree damage and no power for several days. 
 

 Bob was a big disappointment outside of extreme SE MA.

Yeah Gloria was much better. Went to a hurricane party and had to drive across  lawns to get around trees. Irene actually did a surprising amount of damage. Took me months to clear my trails.

[CurlyHeadBarrett]

10 minutes ago, kdxken said:

Yeah Gloria was much better. Went to a hurricane party and had to drive across  lawns to get around trees. Irene actually did a surprising amount of damage. Took me months to clear my trails.

What did you do at the party

was it wild?

[CoastalWx]

25 minutes ago, CurlyHeadBarrett said:

What did you do at the party

was it wild?

He had everyone bring chainsaws and rev them up in the air while taking shots with every damaging gust.

[CurlyHeadBarrett]

8 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

He had everyone bring chainsaws and rev them up in the air while taking shots with every damaging gust.

Shit that’s low inhib asf 

T levels?

[Torch Tiger]

Bob was 10x more exciting than that worthless Gloria

[metagraphica]

24 minutes ago, Torch Tiger said:

Bob was 10x more exciting than that worthless Gloria

All depends on where in New England you were.  Gloria was 10x more exciting than Bob in southern New London county.

[Hoth]

14 minutes ago, metagraphica said:

All depends on where in New England you were.  Gloria was 10x more exciting than Bob in southern New London county.

Yeah Bob did wild damage out here. Docks smashes, maples flattened, beaches rearranged. 

[WinterWolf]

1 hour ago, Torch Tiger said:

Bob was 10x more exciting than that worthless Gloria

As was/has been said, it depended where you are/were.  Gloria came right up over CT, and it was legit hurricane conditions here.  Best tropical experience I’ve ever witnessed. Out east it wasn’t much for you guys. But she was strong here. 
 

Conversely, Bob was nothing here but some drizzle/rain, and breezy winds of 15-20 mph. So nothing exciting at all with Bob. 

[WxWatcher007]

Going to start working on my annual peak season forecast soon. Still thinking it’s extremely active once SAL climo falls some more. 

[kdxken]

2 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

He had everyone bring chainsaws and rev them up in the air while taking shots with every damaging gust.

 

[Torch Tiger]

2 hours ago, WinterWolf said:

As was/has been said, it depended where you are/were.  Gloria came right up over CT, and it was legit hurricane conditions here.  Best tropical experience I’ve ever witnessed. Out east it wasn’t much for you guys. But she was strong here. 
 

Conversely, Bob was nothing here but some drizzle/rain, and breezy winds of 15-20 mph. So nothing exciting at all with Bob. 

Bob's worst was worse than Gloria and over a larger area. I saw easily 100mph winds, maybe 115 peak and a large area saw the same. However, no one really cares about far SE MA/Cape Cod. Had Bob been even 30mi west it would have easily dwarfed that pos gloria

[mcglups]

Looks like Tropical storm Ampil (08W) is going to switch teams to baroclinic but has a chance to regenerate as well. No hard science on this, but in following the Atlantic Basin for swell production and keen eye on the continental westerlies for good winds, usually about 3 weeks after a recurving WPAC system is when I lean a bit into a good period of good winds and swells for SNE.

The swell from Ernesto on Saturday was in the solid utility range (6 feet at 15 seconds) but very much compromised by local SE winds, resulting in very little attenuation as the swell hit the final kilometers of the nearshore zone. If we had sub-moderate NW winds on Saturday before dark, very likely we would have seen some significant breakers.

Onward!

[Torch Tiger]

3 hours ago, metagraphica said:

All depends on where in New England you were.  Gloria was 10x more exciting than Bob in southern New London county.

Regardless of specific location, Bob was worse since it was a more organized TC at landfall with a larger area of max winds.  Gloria was on the down and out rapidly weakening prior to landfall, however Bob had just peaked 6-12 hours earlier and was slowly eroding at LF.  Gloria's max wind area, say 85kt+, was tiny and confined to a small sliver of LI, compared to Bobs which enveloped all CC/Islands plus areas like EWB, PYM

[40/70 Benchmark]

2 hours ago, Torch Tiger said:

Regardless of specific location, Bob was worse since it was a more organized TC at landfall with a larger area of max winds.  Gloria was on the down and out rapidly weakening prior to landfall, however Bob had just peaked 6-12 hours earlier and was slowly eroding at LF.  Gloria's max wind area, say 85kt+, was tiny and confined to a small sliver of LI, compared to Bobs which enveloped all CC/Islands plus areas like EWB, PYM

Bob was stronger, but only a small sliver of se NE was on the dirty side...where I was just NE of Boston, Bob was virtually a non-event...Gloria was more memorable. 

[Torch Tiger]

17 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Bob was stronger, but only a small sliver of se NE was on the dirty side...where I was just NE of Boston, Bob was virtually a non-event...Gloria was more memorable. 

Yeah we know Bob missed most of SNE, like I said 30mi. west would have been a huge I-95 hit

[Snowcrazed71]

11 hours ago, Torch Tiger said:

Bob was 10x more exciting than that worthless Gloria

So I went through both Gloria and Bob. My parents lived in Norwalk when Gloria hit. My brothers and I were standing outside of my parents donut shop taping up the windows. And my brothers and I were standing sideways in the wind while it was holding us up. We had a huge oak tree get uprooted in our yard with a few others that came down as well. 

When Bob hit, my ex and I drove into Rhode Island, and got stuck there as they closed the borders. Borders. So we found a motel and stayed there while Bob was doing his thing. The winds were pretty strong. We were stuck on a road looking for a place to stay and I remember seeing trees getting just leaving the ground and getting blown across the road. It was pretty intense. But I know back in Connecticut, Bob didn't really do anything at all

[40/70 Benchmark]

14 hours ago, Torch Tiger said:

Yeah we know Bob missed most of SNE, like I said 30mi. west would have been a huge I-95 hit

Always hedge east of forecast track up here....at least in the absence of a full capture.

[CoastalWx]

Looks quiet into early September. 

[Typhoon Tip]

The problem with Gloria is that the regional excitement leading ended up getting "screwed."   It was akin to a giant blizzard forecast, where its in the headlines early ... say period 4 blizzard watches issued ( rare ), and then only getting 6-8" out of it with less wind.  

Good storm ...sure, but heh.  Winter or Summer, that feeling of being gypped is the same.

..it weakened at a very rapid rate shortly after turning the corner ENE of the Bahamas.   I think I read somewhere that it took 13 hours to move from roughly that latitude to it's landfall point - very fast forward motion if that's true.  But I know that it dropped from a cat 3/4 all the way down to really barely a cat 1 as it was cutting up across western LI. 

It really was not 'as bad' as it theoretically could have been. 

A disappointment ( in the screwed sense ...) because Gloria spent time as a high end cat 4 as it was passing 70 W down there, and that really sent the headlining and the, at the time, primitive meme society into fever pitch.  There were people taping windows around mid Middlesex Co, some 80 or 90 MI from the S coast.  In retrospect, that was a combination of ignorance and celebrating the dystopia thrill.

What we experienced in Acton, MA, surrounding communities, and most E of the track ( just W of HFD CT to RUT VT) were occasional gusts to 65 mph (ave),  35-ish sustained.  These were not sparsely occurring 65ers, either.  If you experienced Gloria over interior eastern SNE your neighborhoods likely heard Lockheed C-5 Galaxy class aeronautical engine tests, with embedded sounds of failing large timber, more than once or twice.  Power outages were widespread.  Most of the region described was in darkness that night and this lasted for up to a week in some areas. But, this was a high end Wind Warning scenario as it turned out, and does not really describe ( again ) what is theoretically possible - nor did it match very well what the expectations were made to be.  For that, there are mixed opinions.

This is all just the way I remember it for having experienced the full spectrum of a New England Express hurricane, from inception to event-post-mortem.  Others may have more or less impacting memories - I don't mean to gaslight those experiences. 

[Cyclone-68]

Going to Ft Myers’s in a few weeks. Be nice to get something tropical while I’m there 

[tamarack]

Wind damage from Gloria and from Bob was similar (extensive but not catastrophic) in Maine, but Bob had far more rain here.  PWM recorded 1.3" from Gloria and 8.2" from Bob, still the city's 2nd rainiest event, behind the 12"+ from the October 1996 northeast storm.  In September 1985 I'd just started working for Public Lands and was commuting weekly from Fort Kent to Augusta.  Governor Brennan closed state offices at noon that Friday, so I was able to drive north in daylight.  In FK it was just a strong fall storm, with about 1.5" and modest wind. 

Bob is the only TC in my experience that had backside NW winds as strong as the SE, though 95% of the rain came before the wind shift.  A stand of tall bigtooth aspen at the Hebron public lot, ~10 miles NW from LEW, was 2/3 flattened, 1/3 pointing NW and 1/3 pointing SE.  We had 6.41" at our (then) Gardiner home, greatest one-day precip I've measured (2nd was 6" from Belle in FK, August 1976) and 2nd highest for 24 hours behind the 8.9" from the PRE plus Doria in August 1971.

[WxWatcher007]

Not trying to be a wiseass, but I think the last page or so proves a point I’ve made for a long time—it really doesn’t matter what hits someday, there’s going to be part of the region that will meh it because it’s nearly impossible to have a storm large enough with a compact enough inner core to deliver whatever folks’ tropical expectations or fantasies are. 

[Torch Tiger]

4 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Always hedge east of forecast track up here....at least in the absence of a full capture.

Yeah I agree, westerles win minus the sandy/38 type full capture

[CoastalWx]

We went to the Cape a couple of weeks later after Bob (anniversary today). I think Labor Day weekend. Many of those locust trees that are along rt 6 currently were broken and snapped. The tree damage was impressive still even after the cleanup. You could tell it was a big blow there. 

[Torch Tiger]

23 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

We went to the Cape a couple of weeks later after Bob (anniversary today). I think Labor Day weekend. Many of those locust trees that are along rt 6 currently were broken and snapped. The tree damage was impressive still even after the cleanup. You could tell it was a big blow there. 

someday I'll upload the VHS home vid I have, damage was close to remarkable in FMH.  You could see where there were microbursts and even probably a few spin-ups, because there would be dozens if not hundreds of trees knocked over in tight areas.

[CoastalWx]

1 minute ago, Torch Tiger said:

someday I'll upload the VHS home vid I have, damage was close to remarkable in FMH.  You could see where there were microbursts and even probably a few spin-ups, because there would be dozens if not hundreds of trees knocked over in tight areas.

Funny you say that. In 1993 I ran cross country. We had a course down in Dartmouth and my coach said that we had to be careful because there were still some tree dangers with a tornado they had from Hurricane Bob. I was surprised to hear that, but sure enough...tons of trees down in a small area.