Couldn't let the west coast have all the fun

[rcjordan]

Atmospheric river hits Southeast, Mid-Atlantic

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/13/storm-rain-southeast-midatlantic-flooding-updates/83594790007/

Winds 30, Gusts 45+. E-SE (the hardest hitting direction --all open water). Been that way since 9am.  'Seas' in the river 3-4 feet. 

Probably 2 inches of rain so far, no problem  ---hard to flood a pool table.

[ergophobe]

I've never heard of any east coast storm attributed to an atmospheric river. If the term existed when I was living in the northeast, it must have been one that only meteorologists knew.

Have you had one before (i.e. one that was actually called an AR)?

[rcjordan]

>Have you had one before

Not in my memory.

>If the term existed ... it must have been one that only meteorologists knew.

Same here.  I'd not heard the term until the last 10-15 years, maybe. Always west coast.

There was a climatologist on Bsky over the weekend, he said they are pretty rare in the east.  This one spawned in the central Gulf and headed due north for landfall.  I'd have called it an early tropical storm --looked just like one on the charts.

[ergophobe]

The first I heard of it was in 1996/97 when the New Year's Storm flooded Santa Cruz and Yosemite. They had started a new program of flying planes out over the ocean to try to measure atmospheric water content and provide warning before landfall. They attributed that program to Santa Cruz being able to take measures and avoid loss of life.

In Yosemite, BTW, they mostly ignored the warnings and narrowly avoided loss of life and got enough people out to avoid any deaths. My backyard neighbor (who already lived here then, high above the valley floor with no flood risk) was trapped in his girlfriend's 2nd floor dorm room, with 6 feet of water around him. She was trapped at work on a small island.

That was the first time I heard it explained as a "river" of water in the atmosphere, but I was relatively new to California, so maybe it had been used for a long time here.

[rcjordan]

>Probably 2 inches of rain

Nope. Only 0.3 to 1 inch being reported around the area by the array of agricultural weather observers used by NCSU.edu (aka Cow College).  The 'official' rainfall (0.5") is usually taken from the military airport 2 miles from my neighborhood.

Too bad, we're in a pretty severe drought and could have used a couple of inches. Even if most of it would have run off the farm fields are prepped and would have soaked it up.

Last year, I saw potatoes plowed under due to poor rainfall.  We are a major source of potatoes so maybe you need to add a stock of chips to your bunker hoard.

[ergophobe]

>> stock of chips

Unfortunately, that would result in most of those chips being stored around my belly and might result in additional expenditures, like new pants.