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| Odd out of season nor'easter seen developing this morning southeast of New England. The storm will cause "wrong way" east to west weather over Vermont the next couple of days. |
If the sky is darkening to your west, chances are it's about to rain where you are. That makes sense. Weather in Vermont, and most of the northern tier of the United States for that matter, generally goes west to east.
Except for much of this week.
Today, we'll see a few hit and miss showers and maybe brief downpours. Most of us will stay dry, those of us that get a shower won't be in the rain for very long at all. Typical summer stuff.
Except this time, everything is moving east to west. Today and tomorrow, we will have a bout of wrong way weather.
The rule of thumb I started this post with is out the window for a couple days. If the sky is darkening to your west, fuhgeddaboutit. That rain won't bother you. If you see the eastern sky darkening, grab an umbrella, or be ready to run indoors if you don't want to get wet.
The culprit is that out of season nor'easter we've been talking about. That's another weird thing. As I noted the other day, we usually don't see nor'easters in August.
It still looks like this storm will stay far enough east so that we won't receive a tremendous amount of rain, though eastern, especially northeastern Vermont might see some beneficial wetting out of this.
In the winter, when nor'easters usually happen, we just see a high to mid level cold overcast if the storm is too far east of Vermont to produce snow.
But it's summer. The moisture streaming in from the east will help create scattered showers and perhaps a rumble of thunder this afternoon. The east to northeast winds around this storm will drive the showers in an east to west direction, the opposite from what we almost always see.
Click on this link from the National Weather Service office in South Burlington for an idea of how radar might look this afternoon. The showers you see on this forecast loop won't be exactly where they are depicted, but you can see the odd east to west movement of all these showers.
Again, it's summer, so the storm looks a bit odd on satellite imagery. Ocean water is quite warm.
The result is something that is clearly not a tropical storm, but a storm that looks as if it has some tropical characteristics. As of this morning, there were quite a few thunderstorms far offshore of New Jersey, around the storm center.
This, I think, means the storm will have plenty of moisture as it heads north toward eastern Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Up to two inches of rain, could fall in these areas, possibly locally more in Nova Scotia with embedded thunderstorms.
Interestingly, at least for today, the rain will miss drought-stricken southern New England. Gusty northeast winds caused by the storm, combined with the dry ground, could spark some brush fires down that way today. Also, for beachgoing vacationers, the storm is causing dangerous rip currents, large waves and could cause some erosion along the coast.
It looks like the nor'easter might take a - here's that word again - weird path, too. It's starting out well offshore, but once it gets offshore of Maine, it might take a bit of a hook to the northwest. That would throw more rain moving westward across western Maine, northern New Hampshire and probably into northern and eastern Vermont.
There's some questions still over how much rain will fall in parts of Vermont with this, but it won't be a blockbuster downpour. The only odd thing on Wednesday will be that east to west movement of the clouds and rain.
Eventually this storm will depart, and by the end of the week and the weekend, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of west to east weather.
It'll warm up, too. We're expecting high temperatures in the 80s Friday through Sunday, and possibly beyond that.
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