Flooding From Storm "Melissa" Is Worrying Sign Of Future Trouble

Flooding in Annapolis, Maryland on Saturday due
to offshore Tropical Storm Melissa and sea level
rise. Photo by Elly Tierney via the Baltimore Sun

A storm that turned into Subtropical Storm Melissa and then Tropical Storm Melissa has been spinning off the East Coast of the United States for the past week.

During this time, the strong winds from the storm have been pushing water into the shore, causing some coastal flooding from Maine to Florida.

The flooding wasn't super destructive, as floods go, but it was in the way, and caused damage, and was a general nuisance.

This is another ominous example of the rising number of so-called "nuisance" floods along the coast, brought on in large part by yes, climate change.

One disconcerting thing about this Melissa thing is that this wasn't exactly "Storm of the Century" spinning out there. It was powerful, but nothing that out of the ordinary.

True, it was there for an unusually long time, which meant the storm had a long chance to keep piling water up against the East Coast.

Also true was a high pressure system to the north of Melissa - the one that brought most of us here in Vermont some spectacular fall weather - also helped steer water and waves against the coast.

So those were contributing factors. But really. A strong but not all that unusual storm causing such flooding bodes poorly for the future. Especially since astronomical tides this week were pretty low. If there had been a full or new moon during Melissa, there would have been even bigger trouble.

This flooding wasn't just making for narrow beaches and wet ground underfoot. Some people had to be rescued from homes in flood prone coastal Sea Bright, New Jersey, NBC Philadelphia reported.

By Saturday, as Melissa was finally getting ready to depart, the moon was much closer to full, so that, in combination of the storm, sent ocean water into downtown Annapolis, Maryland, says the Baltimore Sun.

The Charlotte Observer says that on Cape Hatteras, waves trapped cars on Route 12, which had to be closed, and caused flooding in Avon, Buxton and other towns on Cape Hatteras.

Splashover and some flooding was reported in coastal New England, too.

All this is going to get worse in the future as sea levels continue to rise. Already, in places like Miami, when astronomical tides are high, there is some flooding even when there is no storm anywhere near Florida.

Along parts of the East Coast, this is double trouble because not only is the sea level rising, but land is sinking due to natural processes.

The East Coast, of course, has always had coastal flooding, battering waves and erosion from storms. Those nor'easters and hurricanes will always keep happening. But as time goes by and sea levels keep going up, those nor'easters and other storms will have more and more power to cause worse and worse coastal flooding because the ocean is higher to begin with, even before the storm.

The destruction will be especially bad when we get the inevitable super storm, like the extreme New England hurricanes of 1815 and 1938;  the Ash Wednesday super nor'easter of 1962 or the Perfect Storm from 1991.

As lovely as large swaths of the East Coast can be, I'm certainly not going to invest in oceanfront property.  I have to wonder about insurance, the economy and survival of coastal communities will be like in coming decades.

Washington DC Drowns In Epic Monday Flash Flood

The now famous phot of the person in the pink Oxford shirt
stranded atop a flooded ar in the Washington DC area
on Monday. 

I'm sure you heard on the news that Washington DC, and parts of Maryland and Virginia had quite a flash flood on Monday.

Lots of people got stranded in cars, and many of those had to be rescued the water came up so fast.

Rainfall rates were incredible. As WTOP explained:

"Reagan National Airport reported 3.3 inches of rain in an hour, including a half inch of rain in 11 minutes, on Monday morning. Between three and six inches of rain had fallen in Montgomery County by 11 a.m."

For perspective, 3.3 inches of rain is very roughly how much rain we should expect around here in Vermont during a full month.

WTOP goes on: "National Weather Service meteorologiset Cody Ledbetter said the storm dumped about 6.3 inches of rain near Frederick, Maryland, about 4.5 inches near Arlington, Virginia."

Driving into flooded roads is a big no-no. But many people got trapped because they set off for their morning commute before it started raining, then became trapped as the downpours hit and water started rising around their cars.

The National Weather Service declared a flash flood emergency, which is meant to (rightly) scare people into getting serious about taking precautions, like staying put and not driving if you were in a safe place that wasn't flooding.

It seemed no place was completely safe. Water even seeped into the White House basement.

As meteorologist Marshall Shepherd noted in Forbes, something called precipitable water was at sky high levels in the DC area Monday morning. It's complicated, but precipitable water is one way of measuring how hard it can potentially rain in a given area.

Precipitable water in the atmosphere was at near record highs at the time of the storms, so all you needed was a trigger to unleash incredible downpours. A weak trough of low pressure in the area did the trick.

You always have to be nervous when they say precipitable water levels are at the highest 1 percent possible. This often leads to flash floods.

Now, climate scientists will tell us that these big flash flood events like the one yesterday are becoming more common as global warming takes hold. Warmer air can hold more water, increasing the chances of flooding downpours.

All this is true. But I think it's impossible to say whether the flood in DC, Maryland and Virginia Monday has a direct line to climate change. Floods like these have always happened, so it could be just chance that this happened. Whether climate change influenced this is right now, anybody's guess.

Of course there's videos.

Here's a compilation of images and clips from NBC:



Here's a clip from the Washington Post. I especially like the sudden waterfalls in the Metro station and in somebody's back yard:



This is, or was, Baker Park in Frederick, Maryland:

BREAKING: Ellicott City, Pretty Maryland Town, Being Devastated Now For 2nd Time In 2 Years

Water approaching second floors of downtown Ellicott City, Maryland
today. The second devastating flash flood there in 2 years. 

Two years ago, Ellicott City, a very pretty, historic city in Maryland, was devastated by an enormous flash flood. 

The gorgeous downtown was destroyed, and the city had just now gotten back on its feet.

Tragically, the exact same thing seems to be happening again this afternoon.

A flash flood emergency has been declared there, and this new video just out of Ellicott City looks just as bad as the last one. If not worse.

The Baltimore Sun reports that water has reached the second floor of Portalli's Italian Restaurant, which didn't happen last time. (Portalli's was the source of many of the dramatic videos from the last flood.)  

Downtown Ellicott City, Maryland today 

There have been several water rescues. Trucks and cars are zipping down the main drag, pushed by the floodwaters.

Downstream from downtown, people are reporting cars and pieces of buildings floating by in the raging river.

Severe flash flooding is hitting surrounding areas, too.



Very sad. Here's the video:

Weird Maryland Tornado And Tropical Storm Franklin Still Threatens Mexico

Flipped cars Monday after a tornado in Salisbury,
Maryland. Photo by Liz Holland/Delmarvanow.com

If you think you've read the headline in today's post before you're kind of right.

Yesterday, I reported news from Sunday on "Weird Tulsa Tornado and Tropical Storm Franklin Threatens Mexico."

Monday was sort of rinse and repeat kind of day.

In Salisbury, in eastern Maryland, a rather unexpected tornado touched down, flipping cars and causing other damage. You can see a security camera video at the bottom of this post of a car blowing out into a street.

Maryland certainly gets tornadoes from time to time, but not all that often. Eastern Maryland has been getting slammed this summer, though. A destructive tornado hit Queen Anne's County, Maryland last month and now this.

Like the Tulsa tornado early Sunday, Monday's twister spun up abruptly. The National Weather Service had warned of a severe thunderstorm, but the storm suddenly began rotating significantly, and the tornado touched down near Salisbury College.

Luckily, there haven't been serious injuries reported.

TROPICAL STORM FRANKLIN

As expected, Tropical Storm Franklin hit Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula last night with sustained wincs of 60 mph.

It's crossing the penninsula now, and weakening since it's over land. Still, it's fairly well organized and should survive the trip over the Yucatan and emerge into the warm waters of the Bay of Campeche tonight.

On the one hand, the waters in the bay are extremely warm, which favors Franklin. It could intensify into a hurricane before it hits the central east coast of Mexico. On the other hand, strong upper level winds and an intrusion of dry air could limit its intensification.

We'll just have to wait and see.

Franklin still poses little or no threat to the United States.

Here's that security cam footage from the Maryland tornado:

Strange Tornadoes: Way North This Past Weekend And More Due

Metal and debris is wrapped around trees near a
tornado-damaged church in Conway, Massachusetts
Sunday. Photo by David Molnar/The Republican

Amid the incredible record heat on Saturday where some rare tornadoes that struck parts of the Northeast.

By the way, more severe weather and possible tornadoes are coming this week from Arkansas to the Middle Atlantic coast.

Also, another squirt of strange late winter heat. More on that in a minute.

I've already remarked at how wild it was to have tornadoes this far north in February. One in Massachusetts was truly remarkable.

A confirmed tornado touched down in Goshen and Conway, in western Massachusetts at around 7:15 p.m. Saturday.  This is only about 15 miles south of the Vermont border.

The National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass. gave the tornado a high-end EF-1 rating, with winds up to 110 mph. This is almost an EF-2 in the srength scale that ranges from zero to five.

This Massachusetts tornado was no brief spin up that we most often see in New England, the kind that just takes down a few trees and rips some siding off a barn.

This one severely damaged several houses on a path that extended for five miles and grew to a width of 200 years. One injury was reported. Hundreds of trees came down. Residents of Conway reported hearing the tell-tale freight train-like roar of a tornado as it approached, and thus had the sense to run to their basements

NWS meteorologists from Taunton said it was extremely fortunate that nobody was killed.

A tornado on the ground in York County,
Pennsylvania Saturday. 

This is an impressive tornado for New England for any time of year. (Most New England tornadoes strike between Memorial and Labor days.)

This was the first recorded February tornado in New England, and that it was so strong is quite something.

Elsewhere,  the confirmed tornado in Pennsylvania came on the exact one-year anniversary of another tornado in the same Pennsylvania county. Plus, as we know, tornadoes in Pennsylvania during February are quite rare.

That 2016 storm spawned widespread tornadoes and severe thunderstorms from the Carolinas to New England.

In Maryland, an EF-1 tornado extended along an 8.4 mile long path through LaPlata and Waldorf. This is only the seventh tornado reported in either January or February in Maryland since 1950, says the Natonal Weather Service in Baltimore/Washington.

More tornado trouble - or at least severe thunderstorm trouble - appears to be on the horizon.

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center says a severe weather outbreak will begin Tuesday, stretching from northeastern Texas into parts of the Ohio Valley.

The area of greatest concern at the moment is in Arkansas and southern Missouri. Details of how the storms will play out, and how many tornadoes form, and how strong they might be, are yet to be worked out.  

A menacing shelf cloud with a severe thunderstorm in
Pennsylvania Saturday. Photo by Marta Poulen.

The severe thunderstorms will move east for Wednesday, affecting a broad area from Louisiana to southern Pennsylvania, and down the coast to about South Carolina.

Strong straight line winds and hail are the biggest threats Wednesday, though there's a good chance there could be a few tornadoes in this broad zone.

This storm will generate another blast of very warm air for late winter in the eastern United States, but it won't be quite as strong and won't last as long as the heat wave last week.

Highs Wednesday will reach the upper 70s in the Washington DC area, around 70 in New York City, and as high as 60 degrees in Vermont.

Sharply colder weather will hit by the end of the week.

Some Lucky Breaks Saved Lives In Ellicott City, Maryland Flash Flood Disaster

Flood damage in Ellicott City, Maryland. 

Now that the water from that epic, very scary flash flood a week ago in Ellicott City, Maryland has receded, it's time to thank our lucky stars that more people didn't die.

As anyone who has seen the videos, the photos and the news reports, this was truly one of the scariest flash floods to affect an American city in recent years 

TERRIFYING WATER, LUCKY BREAKS

Judging from the videos we've seen of the Ellicott City flood disaster, it's amazing only two people died. The charming, historic downtown was bustling with restaurant goers, shoppers, residents and such when the torrential thunderstorms arrived.

As extremely tragic as this flood was, some lucky breaks probably saved lives.  Flash flood warnings from the National Weather Service were timely and strongly worded, giving people who heard them the urgency to get out of the way.

The 135 buildings affected by the flooding in downtown Ellicott were sturdily built, so none collapsed as hundreds of people fled to second floors. Even so, at least two buildings in Ellicott City are now on the verge of collapse because of the flood, but luckily held, sort of, during the flood.

A big lucky break is that the electricity stayed on in much of the flood zone during the disaster.  That meant rescuers could see victims in the water and get them out of danger. It would have taken much longer to find them in the dark, light up the area where they were, and get them out.

The longer people would have been in the raging torrent, the more likely they would have died.

For people caught in buildings, the flood would have been even more terrifying had the lights gone out.  The more scared people are, the more likely they are to do dumb or impulsive things. That could get you in trouble in a hurry during a flash flood.

People also might have unknowingly stepped out into raging water had there been no lights.

EXTREME RAINS:

Rainfall rates in and around Ellicott City Friday evening were off the charts, notes the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. The Maryland city had 0.8 inches of rain in just five minutes. A little more than 3 inches in a half hour. 4.5 inches in an hour -- which, by the way, is about what would normally fall over the course of a month in Ellicott City.

With that rainfall rate, you can see why torrents formed so quickly.

The inevitable question comes next: Did global warming cause this?


Another view of severe flash flood damage in
downtown Ellicott City, Maryland.

The short answer: We don't know. The National Weather Service regarded this as a one in a thousand year event.

That means that in any given year, there's a one in one thousand chance such a big storm would hit the area. It doesn't mean that Ellicott City is safe for the next 1,000 years. It's all the role of the dice.

As the Capital Weather Gang explains, a combination of incredibly high humidity, converging air flow in Maryland and atmospheric instability unleashed the terrible flood. (By converging air, I mean winds in the atmosphere came from different directions and collided over that part of Maryland. When this happens, the air rises, and rising air can set off intense thunderstorms in this kind of air mass.)

I'm not sure if anyone will ever be able to say whether global warming caused this. The best we can do is say that scientists know the frequency of extreme rainfall events is increasing in many parts of the world, including most of the United States.

According to Grist:

"As the temperature of the atmosphere rises, it can hold more moisture, meaning the storms of the future will have more available to turn into torrential rains.

This trend is already visible across the United States, as well as in Maryland. Between 1958 and 2012, the heaviest 1 percent of all rainfall events rose 71 percent in the northeastern part of the country."

Given that, it follows that the Ellicott city disaster might have been influenced by climate change, but we'll probably never know for sure.

There might be another human dimension that might have made the disaster worse. . As Marshall Shepherd notes in Forbes. a lot of the country is urbanized now, covered with asphalt, concrete, streets, parking lots and the like.

Those surfaces are impervious, as opposed to fields and forests, which can absorb some of the excess water that comes with torrential downpours.

All that concrete means water will rush into gulleys and rivers much faster, worsening floods like the one that hit Ellicott City last Saturday.

Just remember, as the people of Ellicott City learned, that every flash flood warning should be taken seriously. As the name implies, these disasters sneak up to you on a moment's notice.

Dance Of The Umbrellas On Maryland Beach

Beach umbrellas race in the wind down an
Ocean City, Maryland beach as a storm arrived Monday.  

On Monday, a gusty thunderstorm rolled into Ocean City, Maryland.

The beach had lots of blue umbrellas to give people shade from the hot sun. Had, because the thunderstorm took the umbrellas and bounced them away, down the beach.

You'll see it in the video below.

The umbrellas could have hurt someone, with their metal poles, but it's still funny to watch. And for the record, I have heard no reports of injuries with this storm on the beach.

H/T to Dennis Mersereau of The Vane, which is Gawker's excellent weather blog, for calling our attention to this video. The video starts slightly slow, but gets good just after the one minute mark: