Well, this is an odd situation for this time of year.
All of Vermont, along with northern New York and much of New Hampshire and Maine are at risk for severe thunderstorms today.
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| Area in yellow has the best chance of scattered severe thunderstorms today. Not everybody will see severe weather, but a few towns could see winds gusting to 60 mph or more in storms. |
This kind of thing doesn't happen much in October at all. The sun's at a low angle now. It's not that warm out anymore.
The humidity is far short of oppressive. Which means this time of year, we don't get the instability in the atmosphere that is usually a key ingredient in severe thunderstorm outbreaks.
Today, though, some ingredients are coming together to create a risk of severe thunderstorms.
It will be rather warm and a little humid for this time of year over Vermont. Nothing record breaking or earth-shattering, mind you, but enough to contribute to some severe storms.
More importantly, a strong cold front will be approaching this afternoon, which will increase instability in the upper levels of the atmosphere. That would help clouds to tower up nicely to form thunderstorms.
Winds are strong several thousand feet overhead, so some of these storms will be able to grab some of that wind and bring them to the surface. That's how you get those strong, gusty winds with severe storms.
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has us in a slight risk zone for severe thunderstorms today. That's level two out of five in an alert scale. That means severe thunderstorms won't be super widespread, but there will be at least a few around.
The biggest threat from these potential storms are those dangerous straight line winds, which could locally reach 60 mph or a little higher. The main batch of storms will move through Vermont northwest to southeast in the mid to late afternoon.
A second, thinner line of showers and possible storms will follow the main event this evening. The evening line will almost certainly not have anything wild with it, other than some brief wind gusts and possible very quick downpours.
In those odd, infrequent autumn bouts of severe thunderstorms around Vermont and the rest of New England, it's extremely rare to spin up a tornado. In this case, there's a very, very low, but not zero chance of a tornado in Vermont. At this point, the most favorable location for a quick twister would be central Vermont. Again, though, I'd stress that the chances of this happening are wicked remote.
That's not to say impossible. There have been New England tornadoes in October. The most notable was the EF-4 tornado around Windsor Locks, Connecticut on October 3, 1979 that left three people dead and caused hundreds of millions of dollars and damage.
We are certainly NOT facing anything remotely like that today. In a quick search this morning, I could find no record of an October tornado in Vermont, though they certainly might have occurred, The closest thing I could find was a waterspout on Lake Champlain in Burlington's bay in 1859.
Things will settle down quickly this evening, setting us up for a cool, but generally sunny, pleasant autumn day on Sunday.
HURRICANE DELTA
Well-forecasted Hurricane Delta came ashore last evening near Creole, Louisiana as a Category 2 storm with top winds of 100 mph.
Delta came ashore just 14 miles east of where Category 4 Hurricane Laura made landfall in August. The National Hurricane Center had the strength, location and timing of Laura down almost perfectly 36 hours before the storm actually hit, which is an amazingly terrific, uber-accurate forecast.
Unfortunately, the effects of Hurricane Delta were also as expected. Of course it caused added damage. It also lofted a lot of the debris left over from Laura into the air, creating ever more damaging missiles that just made everything more damaged and created a bigger mess.
The Weather Channel reported around 800,000 homes without power because of the hurricane, with many reports of structural damage and flooding, mostly from storm surges of up to ten feet deep
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