Torrential Rain, Flash Flooding, and Destructive Winds Tuesday | PIX11 Forecast Focus

[00:00:14]This is PIX11 Forecast Focus with Mike Masko. [music] >> All right, welcome to the Forecast Focus. Doesn't it feel good to breathe again?

[00:00:23]Ah, I mean, stepping outside, especially this morning, two things felt uh the feels were fall, felt a little fallish if you were out in the suburbs. We got down into the 40s up into the Hudson Valley, and the other thing is the air quality is is delicious. We're like uh AQI of 38, I think, at this hour. And uh we can verify that with the Sky Cam luck. You can actually look out towards the Jackie O. You could see all the way to Rockland County this morning up the Hudson River. So, we got some really good stuff over the region.

[00:00:57]Saturday.

[00:00:58]The heck happened Saturday? I mean, look, we said on Friday, Saturday was going to be a rough day, but that those storms were really mean, and they were so widespread.

[00:01:10]The last few bouts of severe weather and flash flooding, um we were talking more on the isolated variety of things. We had one uh storm that sat over Queens. We had one storm that sat over the northern Monmouth County Middlesex County area, but we had stuff blowing up across the city. We had flash flood warnings on Saturday at early afternoon over New York City metro. We had flash flood warnings into central New Jersey, northern New Jersey, southern I mean, everybody was getting hammered.

[00:01:39]We're doing that again.

[00:01:40]Tuesday. Tuesday is now a PIX11 weather alert day for flash flooding and damaging winds.

[00:01:47]So, it's pretty outside. Take graphics, Finn. We'll show uh a beautiful Sky Cam look with great air quality looking up the Hudson River.

[00:01:55]Quick postmortem on the rain. The rain was no joke. 3 and 1/2 4 in on the queen side of things. We had pockets of 6 in of rain. I saw Hoboken uh right around the train station was was uh annihilated with flash flooding.

[00:02:12]I mean cars You had cars Why people do this to this day, I still don't understand it. There is a terminology that Maybe I just have to keep saying it. I thought it was a little hokey to say it cuz I'm like, you know what?

[00:02:23]People have heard this. When thunder roars going indoors, it's kind of a little corny, but it it makes sense, right? Um turn around, don't drown.

[00:02:32]I'm going to start saying this because nobody's listening anymore. We There was a Mercedes on social media. Can't show the video. I don't own the rights. Goes in. There's literally standing water just rippling about.

[00:02:44]Person drives right in. And the water goes over their hood. What do you think's going to happen? When there is water in front of you, you have absolutely no depth perception to say whether you're going to clear it or not. So, this this person just gunned it through it and of course ruined their Mercedes. Stop doing that.

[00:03:02]Stop doing that. It is very dangerous to yourself. It's dangerous to your wallet because I don't know, you know, you Do you know your insurance policy when it comes to accidental versus purposeful acts of flooding?

[00:03:18]You got to check into that.

[00:03:20]Uh northern Monmouth County went under flash flood warnings. And the Navesink River had tons of rain in it. We got 4 plus inches. Middletown Township, Little Crofts, Atlantic Highlands right around the ferry terminal, 4 in. And look at how wide Look how widespread this flash flooding was yesterday. 4 to 5 in across uh places of Warren County. Towns in Warren County. So, we've cleaned out the atmosphere, but here we go again. Right in the queue is another huge upper level low coming out of the lakes. It's actually turning severe warned already as we have this pocket of energy and cold upper air we call it a shortwave trough dipping south and guess what that's coming southbound right over the tri-state area. So there's your lift.

[00:04:05]At the same time you got a ton of humidity that's gathering on the southern periphery of the shortwave. And what ends ends up happening is here's your shortwave track.

[00:04:15]At the same time you have your moisture advection happening because you have a south wind that's in that's starting to develop because it's a counterclockwise spin counterclockwise not clockwise right? The opposite of clockwise counterclockwise and that draws up all the moisture from the south.

[00:04:33]So we're going to get into more humidity. You'll feel it tonight if you're going out. If you're staying out late it's a great night, right? But you're going to feel mugginess the heaviness to the air. It's not going to be that crisp feel like last night.

[00:04:45]So let's take you through future cast.

[00:04:47]Today there's no weather concerns. We're looking at numbers that are into the 80s. We got pristine sky conditions no flight no no concerns with flights leaving all of our major airports and that's really going to hold true right into the overnight and tomorrow morning. If you have a flight out or somebody's coming in to visit I don't think they're going to have a problem getting in here.

[00:05:09]Future cast is going to bring in a lot of clouds tomorrow morning.

[00:05:13]Future cast is also going to bring in the first indications of rain showers.

[00:05:19]Now I think that the rain showers in the early morning hours is actually going to be the saving grace for very explosive thunderstorm activity north of the city up around the Hudson Valley.

[00:05:32]Now daytime heating will start to develop and again this time of the year our daytime heating is really 11:00 a.m.

[00:05:38]all the way until 6:00 o'clock. That is a huge time frame for us to destabilize the atmosphere right? So I think we could see some thunderstorms start to fire off as early as 2:00 across the tristate area.

[00:05:53]The models are cooking storms and it's like a shooting range of storms all over the place for hours. 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, everything tries to shift southbound.

[00:06:11]And then over central New Jersey, we start to clear the coast after 8:00.

[00:06:16]So, when you think about modes of severe weather, as long as we have storms firing off, I think that's going to taper the damaging wind situation, and I think it's going to taper the idea of the tornado threat, which on Saturday was very real, but the wildfire smoke actually helped to limit the potential of that.

[00:06:38]We didn't have wildfire smoke, we would have had a red letter horrible day for severe weather across the tristate area.

[00:06:44]Across everywhere. I think we would have had multiple tornadoes because of the amount of wind shear.

[00:06:49]That was Saturday.

[00:06:51]As long as we have storms firing off left and right, right and left, all day on on Tuesday, I think that's going to limit the available potential energy to fire these storms and turn make them supercells.

[00:07:04]By the way, Wednesday is we're back to beautiful. There's an isolated thunder threat on Wednesday still, but it's nothing like Tuesday.

[00:07:11]So, I showed this to you on Friday in anticipation for Saturday to give you an idea what the atmosphere is doing.

[00:07:21]Remember our cardinal rules.

[00:07:23]Anything that's 1,000 J/kg of cape is considered high levels of storm energy.

[00:07:31]When you have a lot of storm energy to tap into, you grow these storms both in the vertical and both horizontally, meaning they get juicier and bigger, they get vertically stacked, so they're dragging down a lot of upper level air.

[00:07:44]And that's your damaging wind threat.

[00:07:46]Notice how you get into the city, you get into the Hudson Valley, you're very you you know, you're borderline. You're nothing over Connecticut River Valley at lunchtime.

[00:07:55]And that kind of stays the case all day on Tuesday where the core of storm energy, where now you're exceeding 2,000 J. That's it.

[00:08:06]Uh you get it near the Philly area into like a Norristown. Oh, love Norristown area, the Manayunk area.

[00:08:14]Worked in Philadelphia, so I have an idea of these places. And you may know, too, if you're watching from that area.

[00:08:19]These are the areas that have the highest potential of wind damage.

[00:08:24]Let's go into Tuesday afternoon.

[00:08:27]The city is now 1,500 J per kil J per kilogram. That is some pretty beefy storm energy. You have that going on Now you're exceeding two and three thousand across central New Jersey.

[00:08:43]You have this corridor of intense storm energy going on across northwest New Jersey hills. That's interesting to me.

[00:08:48]That's telling me the models are saying we are going to clear out the early storms, the first batch of storms. We're going to destabilize the atmosphere, and there's going to be another batch of storms that moves through.

[00:09:00]Keep that in mind right there.

[00:09:02]Even into 5 o'clock, we still have very robust cape energy across all of western New Jersey, central New Jersey, southern New Jersey. The city still borderline.

[00:09:12]And then we start to break down all the storm energy. We've lost the daytime heating. The cold front is now closing in on the area, and we've basically lost all of it.

[00:09:22]The other variable that we need to watch, and I saw this and my eyes kind of popped a little bit. The other thing we need to watch is storm energy, which is now signaling strong over central and southern New Jersey.

[00:09:35]So, these storms have uh potential of turning converting general thunderstorm activity into something more severe.

[00:09:45]Where we can start to tap into some damaging winds, your straight-line winds. One or two may spin.

[00:09:50]That's why there's a tornado threat.

[00:09:53]And that goes into the evening hours over central New Jersey, the evening hours over central New Jersey.

[00:09:58]Meanwhile, it's a flash flood threat from the city north.

[00:10:02]I'm going to tie this all together. I'm going to show you the worst severe winds, the best potential of maybe a quick spin-up tornado. It's coming up next.

[00:10:13]>> [music] >> You're watching [music] Forecast Focus with Mike Masco.

[00:10:26]>> [music] >> All right. So, let's take a step back.

[00:10:29]I'm going to give you the general sense, and then we're going to break it down by the two modes of severe weather.

[00:10:34]First, three primaries primary headlines for impacts on Tuesday.

[00:10:40]Wind gusts of 70 mph are on is on the table.

[00:10:44]Flash flooding, I think is is is pronounced across the entire Channel 11 viewing area from the lower Hudson Valley. And let me emphasize extreme lower Hudson Valley, like Tappan Zee Bridge um to Rye to uh Redding, Connecticut to Monroe, Orange County, and Port Jervis.

[00:11:03]That's your line.

[00:11:06]Tons of lightning.

[00:11:07]There's going to be a lot of humidity, so tons of lightning. All right. This is what we're thinking in terms of severe wind risk. Who could get maybe a 70-mph wind gust? I think the highest potential is west of the city. We just showed you the storm energy. The most storm energy is going to be found across western and central New Jersey. I showed you that to you. This is what the Storm Prediction Center thinks. They think very high likelihood across central Pennsylvania.

[00:11:32]By the way, on Saturday we had multiple tornado warnings over central and western Pennsylvania.

[00:11:37]Ironically, or not ironically, depending on how you're looking at it, where we didn't have the the wildfire smoke. We have no wildfire smoke this go around.

[00:11:46]So, there's no cap to the atmosphere.

[00:11:48]There's no stabilizing factor to dry out the atmosphere like smoke does. So, there is a high ceiling for severe wind risk across western and central Pennsylvania.

[00:12:00]There is the potential of a few strong tornadoes. There's a moderate risk of tornadoes rooted right around the cold front.

[00:12:07]And that's going to be over the city.

[00:12:09]That's going to be over northern New Jersey, and that's going to be into central Pennsylvania.

[00:12:14]But, we have to include the city for safe measures. Is this a tornado outbreak? No.

[00:12:19]No.

[00:12:21]But, I'm saying that this is a better chance than low this go around.

[00:12:26]The other thing I want to show you modeling-wise, and I have two forecast models.

[00:12:31]A global model that has a larger scale, meaning or a lower scale, I should say, is hinting at the idea of 2 in or more of rain in the tri-state area.

[00:12:43]When you go to a more of a finer scale, which we can see more in the models, we see indications of the potential of isolated 5-in amounts.

[00:12:52]You have a flash flood signal flashing bright red for Tuesday.

[00:12:57]For Tuesday.

[00:12:59]So, when you put this all together, there is a flood risk.

[00:13:03]Not all places are equal in this flood risk. And the area that I think has a moderate to at times high likelihood of flooding is going to be Middlesex County, Hunterdon County, Warren County, Monmouth County, Ocean County, Mercer County, Burlington County.

[00:13:20]I don't I'm not ready to say the city is out of that.

[00:13:24]Oh, I forgot. Got forgot about this, too. This would have been a big focus if we didn't have so much going on Tuesday.

[00:13:31]Tropical Depression 2.

[00:13:33]This may become Bertha.

[00:13:35]It's not going to be big Bertha. It doesn't have much room to run to develop, but we have what will likely become a tropical Oh, sorry. We just got the new advisory. This is a tropical Well, is it It will be It is a tropical storm.

[00:13:50]Sorry. This is Bertha now.

[00:13:53]This is what I'm talking about. It's so borderline. You have to look close to say, "Uh, is that Yep. Yep, that is."

[00:13:59]So, we got Tropical Storm Bertha, second named storm of the season. Okay?

[00:14:03]Okay. Is that impacting us? No. Some of the moisture may get northbound um a week out from today, but that we're talking fringe in We're going to get water vapor, not so much water itself.

[00:14:14]Uh, trend is our friend if you don't want heat. 10-day trend's looking really good. Rain chance is looking horrible for tomorrow as mentioned with the flash flood threat signal flashing.

[00:14:23]And we got Wednesday also an isolated deal before we dry out as we go into next week.

[00:14:29]There's a lot of information here.

[00:14:31]So, let's tie this together into your hyper-local 7-day forecast. New York City, your severe weather chances are very high on Tuesday with flash flooding being the primary mode of severe weather.

[00:14:40]We dry out. We clear out for the rest of the week. It's marvelous going into the weekend. I mean, make your plans. I I don't see any I don't see any indication of the weekend forecast getting cratered by like Wednesday. You know, where you're like everything looks great and then by Wednesday you're like, Remember when I said it looked great?

[00:14:56]Not anymore. I'm not seeing that.

[00:14:59]Long Island, I think your primary mode is is general thunderstorms, some of which could be strong to severe, but I think your severe threat is down the Jersey Shore on Tuesday.

[00:15:11]Okay?

[00:15:12]Some afternoon thunderstorms are definitely in the in the cards for Wednesday. And then we're all we're off to the races with temperatures into the high 70s and low 80s.

[00:15:22]Suburbs?

[00:15:23]Suburbs?

[00:15:25]We got to talk about severe winds.

[00:15:27]I think your best chance is western suburbs of New York City will see potential of hurricane force wind gusts and flash flooding on Tuesday before you dry out and clear out.

[00:15:38]We'll get through Tuesday. I'm telling you it's a speed bump in the grand scheme of things. We will talk tomorrow.

[00:15:44]It's a very important episode of the forecast focus for your Tuesday as it is a Pix 11 weather alert day. We'll see you tomorrow. [music]