Signing off, for now
Via the Catskills region blog The Watershed Post, here’s another incredible video of the epic river flooding caused by Hurricane Irene’s torrential rains:
Dr. Jeff Masters has more on the catastrophic flooding, including some nifty charts showing various rivers’ flood-stage situation. You can find more river flood gauges here. Great stuff from the National Weather Service. Also from the NWS, the final advisory on Irene from the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center includes a ton of eye-catching numbers, with more than 30 locations reporting double-digit rainfall totals. The highest figure is an incredible 20.40 inches in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
With that, I’ll be signing off this blog until the next hurricane threatens, or events otherwise warrant. My role here as PJ Media’s “Weather Nerd” is to provide updates on active, significant tropical cyclones threatening the United States, so Irene’s official demise last night is the blog’s cue to go dormant again for a while. Perhaps I’ll be back in a week or so to talk about Hurricane Katia, presently known as Tropical Depression 12, which formed this morning off the African coast and is expected to steadily strengthen as it churns west over open waters. But then again, perhaps not: there’s an excellent chance “proto-Katia” won’t ever threaten the U.S., per Dr. Masters: “Forecast tracks from the long-range GFS and ECMWF models suggest that Bermuda and Canada might be the only land area threatened by TD 12, but it is too early to be confident of this.”
Anyway, until the next storm threatens, you can follow me on Twitter (though, be warned, my timeline will soon have more talk of college football than hurricanes) or on my personal blog, The Living Room Times.
P.S. The Red Cross is conducting relief efforts in the areas hit hard by Irene. You can donate here. For all the talk about “overhype,” this is a tremendous catastrophe in Vermont, the Catskills, and other regions swamped by flooding rains, so I’d encourage you to help out if you can.






Thanks for sharing your work with us, Brendan. I appreciate it.
Thank you for your hard work during this storm. Your frequent, clear, detailed, and levelheaded updates were a tremendously useful source of information to us here in North Carolina.
Thanks to you for your timely reports and to MileHighBecky for understanding whilst you took the time away from caring for her and the kiddies to send us reports. I hope shes feeling better.
Read your blog every day and on Friday it convinced me to move my flight to Baltimore to late Friday night – I was able to get in and see my friends and help them and their families get ready for the storm as they were basically panicking because of the hype they had been seeing on the local coverage. I was able to explain to them what was really happening and calm them down. There were power outages across the area but no significant damage.
Made me look like a weather genius…
Thanks Brendan – good work
Thanks, Brendan.
BTW, I am totally impressed with that school bus.
Its not as exciting as hurricanes, but you could always discuss how southern Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and much of New Mexico continue to suffer drought. And is the drought going to end this winter or continue?
Of course, southern Colorado is invisible from Denver. Its like there is a big wall somewhere around Castle Rock…
I could, but if I kept up my furious pace of weather blogging when there are no hurricanes to track, I’d probably lose my job and maybe my wife.
Despite its NYT-ordained title, this is fundamentally a hurricane blog, and I’m afraid I just don’t have the time to expand it beyond that mission.
Thanks again, Brendan. I quit watching TV news altogether a couple of years ago, and now rely on a myriad of online sources for my news and information. Since I remembered your Katrina posts from 2005, yours was one of my go-to sites throughout the past weekend, and I linked your posts at various other places. It was all the more interesting since Irene affected me personally, unlike Katrina. I came through fine, by the way. I didnt even lose power.