Date added: Saturday September 16, 2006: 10:00pm EST

Helene Finally a Hurricane- US Strike Not Ruled Out Yet; Gordon Weakens in Open Water

By HurricaneNow.com
Chief Correspondent Jeff Flock

Helene Hurricane # 4 of 2006

The National Hurricane Center has upgraded Helene to hurricane strength while backing off a bit on their intensity forecast. They now see a 90knot or 104mph hurricane at max which should be about 4-5 days from now. The question remains:will it ever make a US landfall. The models seem in pretty good agreement on the track for the 5-day forecast period, then disagree about when and if it will curve. Curvature certainly seems most likely, with Helene following the path of Gordon and Ernesto given the low pressure over the US east coast that has tended to drive storms away and into the east flowing jet stream.

Pattern Could Continue

There is no good reason to believe this pattern won't continue for the foreseeable. Wunderground.com's Jeff Masters makes the point in much more depth more succinctly than I could in his latest blog. (Wunderground Blog from Jeff Masters) Bottom line: likelihood that we may have already seen the worst of what was supposed to be a nasty hurricane season. By my count we've had only one hurricane on the US mainland and that was only a barely Cat 1 Ernesto. Of course, this is the weather. And as they say, if things change, things change. Which is to say if that low pressure finds some reason to move off we could see any tropical development do come out very differently. Though we are past the peak, there is plenty of hurricane season left. Though water temperatures are starting to cool they are still plenty warm. Though there is talk of the seminal El Nino event off the west coast of South America spawning increased wind shear that would tear up tropical systems, this has not so far been the case. While it looked like the conditions were ripe for a bad year at the outset of the 2006 hurricane season I suggested at the start that didn't mean it would happen. And now that conditions appear in place to assure a relatively quiet remainder of the season I would again point out that's not a foregone conclusion.

And Even Worse...

"That Seemed Like A Hurricane"

What Florence did to Newfoundland this week long after she ceased being a tropical system is a reminder that it doesn't take a hurricane to produce hurricane-like damage. As you'll read in this section of HurricaneNow.com describing why we do what we do, my first memory as a child is of Hurricane Donna hitting New Jersey in 1960. But my most vivid childhood weather memory was the "Great March Storm of 1962." Sometimes called the "The Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962," it was one of the most destructive systems ever to hit the Mid-Atlantic states. In fact it is listed as one of the ten worst storms to have hit anywhere in the United States in the 20th century. It did $80 mil. damage in 1962 dollars, in New Jersey alone, destroying 45,000 homes. It ripped apart some of Atlantic City's "Steel Pier" and the famous horse "Misty of Chincoteague" made famous in the children's book, survived the storm by being brought inside a house. Perhaps you or your children also read "Stormy, Misty's Foal," which was about Misty's foal born just after the storm.

I still have a picture book of the Great March Storm's damage put out by the local newspaper and the aftermath sure looks like a hurricane went through. I always thought of it as a hurricane but it was in fact a "Noreaster." Though no where near as bad, that's some of what the folks in Newfoundland got from the former hurricane Florence. It demonstrates that just because a storm is no longer "tropical" (or a so-called "warm core" storm fueled by the ocean's heat) it can still be just as powerful.