Blog Article

Bertha Makes Landfall as MLB Ballparks Watch the Sky

Tropical Storm Bertha comes ashore near New Orleans as the same front behind last night's tornadoes lingers over tonight's East Coast baseball games.

Bertha's Ashore, and the Ballparks Are Watching the Sky

Alright folks, let's talk about what happened in the sky today while everybody was watching their phones for baseball scores.

Bertha came ashore this afternoon

Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall on the eastern side of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, around 2 pm CDT today, just southeast of New Orleans. Hurricane Hunters flew through it earlier and found max winds near 45 mph with a pressure of 1000 millibars. That's a modest tropical storm, but modest doesn't mean nothing. The center is sheared up pretty good, and the strongest winds are actually sitting well south and southeast of the center, out over open Gulf water, not right at the coast.

Bertha's still crawling west at about 7 mph, and the tropical storm warning has been stretched westward to cover southwestern Louisiana. Morgan City, Houma, and Central Louisiana are all still in what our impact model flags as "action" territory tonight, and the warning zone now reaches into Sabine Pass, right on the Texas line. If you're anywhere along that stretch of coast, tonight's still a night to keep one eye on the wind and the other on the tide gauge.

The same front, one day later

Here's the thing that's easy to miss. Last night's severe weather outbreak, the one with radar-confirmed tornadoes in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pendleton County, West Virginia, plus that waterspout that came ashore at Cape May Point, New Jersey, didn't just disappear overnight. It was tied to a slow-moving front, and that front is still out there today, just weaker.

Tonight, SPC has a Marginal risk of severe storms stretching from the Mid-Atlantic into New England, and it happens to run right through tonight's baseball schedule. Orioles at Red Sox in Boston. Pirates at Yankees in the Bronx. Padres at Braves in Atlanta. All three ballparks sit inside that Marginal zone, where the setup supports isolated damaging wind gusts and a slim 2 percent chance of an isolated tornado if anything does organize. That's a big step down from last night's outbreak, but it's the reason you might see a tarp come out mid-game somewhere on the East Coast tonight.

Meanwhile, Bertha's leftover tropical moisture is teaming up with that same stalled front to create a bigger headache for southeast Virginia and the Outer Banks. The Weather Prediction Center has a Moderate risk of excessive rainfall there through Thursday, meaning training thunderstorms could stack up two to four inches or more with rain rates over an inch and a half per hour. That's a flash flood setup, not a rainout at the ballpark.

Smokey and the Bandit gets a clean sky

Now flip over to El Paso, where the Plaza Classic Film Festival is running an outdoor triple feature tonight: Taxi Driver, The Sixth Sense, and Smokey and the Bandit. Funny enough, that last one is basically a two-hour road trip through the exact kind of Southern weather we're talking about tonight, minus the Trans Am.

Far west Texas isn't showing up anywhere in today's severe or rainfall outlooks. The Marginal risk today only reaches into southeast Texas around Houston, nowhere close to El Paso. That's a good sign for anybody with a lawn chair and a movie ticket tonight. No fronts, no tropical moisture, nothing to chase folks inside. It's a reminder that Texas is a big place, and "weather in Texas" can mean two completely different nights depending on which end of the state you're standing in.

A quiet note from space

One more thing worth a glance tonight if you're anywhere with dark skies up north. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center says a G1, or Minor, geomagnetic storm is likely late tonight thanks to a coronal hole high speed stream hitting Earth, on top of some M-class solar flare activity from an active sunspot region. G1 is the lowest tier on the geomagnetic storm scale, so don't expect anything dramatic, but folks along the Canadian border with clear skies might catch a faint aurora glow low on the horizon.

The takeaway

Weather doesn't take a night off just because the calendar says ballgame or movie night. Tonight, Bertha's spinning down over Louisiana while its moisture feeds a flood threat up the Atlantic coast, the same front from last night's tornado outbreak is still lurking behind tonight's baseball slate, and El Paso gets to enjoy Burt Reynolds under a clear sky because it happens to sit outside all of it. Check the radar before first pitch, and if you're near the coast from southwest Louisiana into the Florida Panhandle, Bertha's not done yet.

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