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| Cloudy, windy November skies over St. Albans, Vermont a couple years ago. We're in the thick of overcast stick season now and we'll see a lot of that in the coming days. |
The past few days have been cloudy and rather chilly, at least comparatively speaking. And it's about to get colder. And more windy. It IS November in Vermont, after all. You really need to expect this. Sorry.
As I write this mid-morning Sunday, the wind is just beginning to blow outside my house in St. Albans, Vermont. November is usually quite a windy month, and today will help cement that reputation.
Gusts will go past 40 mph in many locations, especially in the Champlain Valley. There might be a little light precipitation, mostly rain, but maybe some mix in the mountains and Northeast Kingdom. But the bulk of the rain will hold off until later this afternoon.
It's not just us that are getting some good wind gusts. There have been a lot of wind warnings and advisories from coast to coast the past few days.
Today a huge area around the Great Lakes and Ohio and Tennessee valleys are under wind advisories or high wind warnings.
Things will be particularly bad along Lakes Erie and Ontario in New York and Ontario. Winds gusting past 60 mph will shove already high lake water onto west and south facing shores in New York and Ontario, which is sure to set off flooding and a lot of erosion.
Storm surges on the eastern end of Lake Erie are expected to be as high as seven feet, and wave heights on the lake could reach 25 feet. This will probably be among the worst storms on record for that lake.
Again, this is pretty typical of November, the exceptional power of the Lake Erie storm notwithstanding. It's a stormy month, and the Great Lakes are a particular epicenter for November tempests. I bring this up every year, but I have to mention the real life storm and shipwreck in the song "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" happened in mid-November in the Great Lakes.
Most of these November storms have cold fronts that bring in increasingly heavy tastes of winter air and this will be no exception.
Temperatures will decline Monday through Wednesday, and by then, high temperatures will only reach the 20s. It'll be the coldest day since around the first of March. There won't be much snow with this, but a few inches worth of snow showers could pile up in the mountains.
It's still a little early for hard core winter, so that type of cold won't last. Highs will be in the near seasonal low to mid 40s by the end of the week.
Again, none of this is odd for Vermont, but it does come as a slap in the face after last week.
HURRICANE IOTA
What I described above is absolutely trivial compared to what is going on, and what is about to go down in Nicaragua and Honduras.
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| Satellite view of Hurricane Iota quickly ramping up east of Nicaragua this morning. It poses a terrible threat to that nation by tomorrow. |
Earlier this month, those two nations were hit by Category 4 Hurricane Eta, with devastating results. High winds and especially devastating floods killed dozens and left towns and rural areas in ruins.
It's bad enough to be hit by a storm like that. It's inconceivable to be hit by a second storm of similar strength a couple weeks later.
But that appears to be in the cards.
Hurricane Iota is strengthening explosively in the western Caribbean Sea.
It went from not really a big deal Saturday morning to a monster with sustained winds of 90 mph this morning. It continues to power up massively and is forecast to be a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 140 mph by Monday.
At that point, Hurricane Iota will be approaching Nicaragua and Honduras in roughly the same spot Eta hit The region is incredibly vulnerable because of the devastation from Eta, so this really looks like a worse case scenario .
If I'm dreading this from my safe home in Vermont, imagine how people in Nicaragua and Honduras feel.
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