Hurricane Maria Hit Puerto Rico This Morning. It Looks Really Bad

Damage from Hurricane Maria in Martinique, which
wasn't even hit as hard by the hurricane as places
like Dominica, which people really can't get to yet. 

Powerful Hurricane Maria, as expected, plowed into the southeastern corner of Puerto Rico early this morning, and is spending the morning on a terrible northwestward path across the island.

Maximum sustained winds at landfall were 155 mph. Terrifying. True, that's a little less than the 175 mph earlier last night, but the difference is really minimal.

Maria also ran directly over the tiny island of St. Croix, and I'm sure there's terrible devastation there, too.

As you can imagine, I don't yet have many fresh reports coming out of St. Croix and Puerto Rico, as of early this morning as the region was still being crushed by Maria. I am concerned by media reports that not many Puerto Ricans went to emergency shelters in sturdy buildings, choosing to ride out the storm in flimsier structures. That can get deadly.

One big danger in such intense hurricane winds is that debris is flung around violently, and this debris becomes deadly missiles. Not only is there new debris flying around in the terrible winds of Maria, but there was still a lot of fallen trees, branches and detritus from Hurricane Irma a couple weeks ago that is also being blown around.

At this point, it looks like that after Puerto Rico, Maria will become somewhat less danger, but still a big menace. Of course by then, the damage will have been done.

Hurricane Maria is forecast to sideswipe the Dominican Republic and then head northwestward to the east of the Bahamas.  So far, it looks like Maria will stay east, in the Atlantic Ocean offshore of the United States, but there's still no guarantees.

We actually have ex-hurricane Jose to thank for likely causing Maria to probably miss the United States. A strong ridge of high pressure, which is part of a strange weather pattern I'll get to in a minute, is parked over the Northeast and southeastern Canada.

Had it been able to assert itself further east, the high pressure system would have steered Maria toward the East Coast.

However,  Jose caused an area of weakness in the high pressure ridge, and prevented it from spreading out into the ocean waters east of Canada's Maritime provinces. Instead of being blocked by the high and moving westward, Hurricane Maria will be drawn into that "weakness" that is off the U.S. East Coast.

Satellite view of terrifying Hurricane Maria making
landfall in Puerto Rico this morning. 

Still, we have some more tropical strangeness to get through out in the Atlantic. Jose is slowly spinning down, but will stall for days southeast of New England.

Jose caused coastal flooding, and a lot of beach erosion across the Northeast Tuesday, and that will continue, at least for some extent, for the next few days.

There's even the chance of something called the Fujiwhara effect, when two tropical cyclones get too close to each other and start rotating counterclockwise around each other. The Weather Channel says to think of it like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the fair, except we're talking tropical cyclones, not teacup rides at the county fair.

The Fujiwhara effect in this case, if it develops, could fling a weakened Jose westward into New Jersey while slingshotting Maria northeastward out to sea. This is by no means guaranteed, but it is one scenario which could play out. We'll see.

The high pressure system I told you about that is, or is not influencing Hurricane Maria is part of a rather extreme and stuck weather pattern developing across the nation. When things don't move along as they normally do, the weather gets weird, and that's starting now.

The high pressure ridge will likely cause near record high temperatures in southeastern Canada, part of the eastern Great Lakes and northern New England, including here in Vermont over the weekend.

We've already had this type of weather over the past week as the weather patterns have been stuck for awhile now.

Meanwhile, out in the the northern Plains, severe weather is an issue. There were reports of at least four tornadoes in South Dakota yesterday, and there is a chance of severe weather, including the possibility of tornadoes all week, with the biggest chance of dangerous storms Friday in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota.

What luck! I'm flying into South Dakota Friday.

The slow moving storms out in the Plains could cause flooding problems over the weekend, too.

Meanwhile, the stuck weather pattern will keep the snow piling up in the mountains of Montana, northwestern Wyoming and Alberta, Canada., among other places in the northern Rockies. A few of the highest elevations could get a foot and a half of snow.

Yikes! An early winter.