Isaias is about to become a historic season’s first hurricane and may bring rain to the Philly area
Tropical Storm Isaias is forecast to reach Category 2 status Friday night. Its remnants could soak the region.
After what has been a historic wait, a tropical storm off the east coast of Mexico was forecast to ripen into the first Atlantic hurricane Thursday morning, and it may have some effects on the Philadelphia region.
Around here it may be just rain with a name, but Isaias (yes, you may have heard the name before) is forecast to generate profoundly heavy rains in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.
The National Hurricane Center was projecting that before making landfall, Isaias would peak Friday night as a Category 2 hurricane, with top winds at 110 mph, just below “major” status.
After landfall, it would weaken and head toward the Ohio Valley, losing some of its tropical characteristics, forecasters said.
The remnants then will head our way, and among the computer models “there is strong agreement” that Isaias’ leftovers would “bring some impacts to the region,” the National Weather Service said.
“There could be some heavy rainfall,” said Mike Lee, a meteorologist in the Mount Holly office. “We’ll have to keep a close eye on it to see how things evolve the next couple of days.”
By then the storm would have shed most or all of its tropical identity.
The federal Weather Prediction Center had the region under a “marginal” risk for heavy rains.
On Wednesday evening, the storm still was about 500 miles south of the Gulf Coast, and thus it was awfully early to say what it would do in a place about 1,200 miles from the storm center.
If you were around here in August 2020, you probably well remember another Isaias, a tropical storm that resulted in widespread flooding and knocked out power to 600,000 utility customers in the Philly region
That Isaias took a track up the East Coast and through the region, spawning two tornadoes and generating close to 9 inches of rain in Harleysville, Montgomery County.
If you’re wondering why we are getting an Isaias 2.0, the hurricane center recycles names every six years, except in the case of an especially destructive storm — think Katrina in 2005, or Ida in 2021. Those names are retired.
In a hyperactive season in which the numbers of named storms exhausted the alphabet, the previous Isaias was a Category 1 hurricane with peak winds of only about 85 mph, so it didn’t make the retirement grade.
This will not be an Isaias the First redux, but it is ensured a place in history for being the latest first hurricane in the 60-year period of satellite observation.
A first hurricane of the season did develop on Oct. 8, 1905, said Philip Klotzbach, atmospheric scientist with the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, none formed in 1907 and 1914.
However, it is possible that hurricanes occurred in the pre-satellite era but were undetected.
This year’s lull is attributed to the El Niño warming in the equatorial Pacific, which has been interacting with the overlying atmosphere to generate storm-killing upper-air winds from the west.
Conversely, the Pacific hurricane season has been on fire.
