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 Pajamas 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.