Semi-Tropical Storm Nestor: Weak On Paper, Nasty In Reality

Tropical Storm Nestor about to make landfall in northwestern Florida
this morning.

Tropical Storm Nestor, if you can call it that, is expected to make landfall in northwestern Florida today..

It doesn't at all look like a classic tropical storm. It looks more like just a regular old nasty batch of thunderstorms arranged in a comma shape. 

Top sustained winds  this morning were  a ho-hum 50 mph. It was even kind of hard to pick out its center of circulation, as it mostly consisted of rough weather to the north and east of the center. 

So on paper, Nestor is not much to worry about. In reality, though it's a pretty rough one.

It's coming ashore, as I said in northwestern Florida. The topography of the region is helping make the storm surge from Nestor worse than it otherwise would be, so flooding is a problem.

As you can see on a map, the coastline of western Florida makes an arc like a tilted, backwards "C" between Pananma City in the panhandle, and Tampa, halfway down the west coast.

Water is being driven from the southwest toward the northeast into this backwards "C".  That tends to shove and converge water into the middle of this curving coastline.  Which means Nestor is capable o storm surges of three to five feet above normal water levels.

Since much of this coastline is low and flat, water can definitely push inland past the beaches into homes and businesses. There was already a round of storm surge flooding last night, and there will be another one today.

Friction with land can also help make the disorganized storms with Nestor, creating tornadoes. There were already a couple last night, including one that sent debris flying across busy Interstate 4 near Lakeland Florida.

More tornadoes will probably touch down in Florida and Georgia today.

What's left of Nestor will move up over the eastern Carolinas today and tomorrow, then out ot sea.  It won't really affect Vermont much, except perhaps add a little moisture to a cold front coming in Tuesday night.

That cold front, and not Nestor, will be the main player for us here in Vermont. We'll get a decent slug of rain out of it but not nearly as much as we got from that nor'easter on Thursday. So the flood threat looks pretty low at this point