Ernesto Prepares For a Direct Hit on Florida
The latest forecasts for Ernesto show the storm returning to hurricane status after it spends today moving over Cuba. By early Wednesday morning, Ernesto will pass over the Florida Keys, and will spend the day on Wednesday raining on Florida, before emerging into the Atlantic early Thursday. By the end of the week, the hurricane will be near the North Carolina-Virginia Border.
This is going to bring a lot of rain along the Eastern seaboard, as you can see from the five day precipitation forecast shown at the right. About 8 inches of rain is expected in the Miami area, and up to ten inches in the outer banks of North Carolina.
The storm is being kept from moving further west by an upper level trough and its associated surface front currently stretching from Illinois to New Jersey. That low pressure system is slowly moving south, and will likely give us rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, before it is finally absorbed by Ernesto.
The trough is not only increasing the chances that Ernesto will cause minimal havoc to west Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. It’s also likely to be the system that breaks the back of our summer heat. After everything passes through on Thursday, temperatures will moderate to the upper 70s to low 80s for Labor Day weekend, with lows in the low 60s. With dewpoints in the 50s on Labor Day, the humidity will be gone as well.
Typically Atlanta gets a front like this that brings some relief from summer weather in mid-August, only to see a final blast of summer before things cool down permanently in mid-September. We didn’t see that this year; instead it looks like we are going to see fall-like weather enter our area to stay before Labor Day.
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