Blog Article
Subtropical Storm Josephine: New England Impacts Tonight
Subtropical Storm Josephine brings tropical storm-force wind to Cape Cod and Rhode Island tonight. Here's what a subtropical storm is and who it affects.
Josephine Shows Up Uninvited to New England's Midweek Game Night
Alright folks, I know good and well half of y'all have got one eye on the Celtics tonight, or you're checking scores on Hawks-Magic and Bucks-Wizards because it's NBA opening week. But up along the New England coast, there's a different kind of action getting underway, and it just earned itself a name a few hours ago: Subtropical Storm Josephine.
The National Hurricane Center dropped Advisory Number 1 this afternoon. Josephine was sitting about 265 miles south of Nantucket with 65 mph winds, and she's crawling north at a lazy 6 mph. That's not a hurricane threat to the coast. But it is enough to kick up tropical storm force gusts across Cape Cod tonight, with an 80 to 90 percent chance of 39+ mph winds there right now, and Rhode Island sitting in a 50 to 60 percent window for the same thing.
Wait, what's a "subtropical" storm anyway?
Here's the thing. Josephine didn't start life as a warm, juicy tropical system spinning up off Africa. She started as a cold-core area of low pressure, the kind of system you'd normally just call a strong offshore gale. Over the last day or two, though, the fronts attached to that low dissipated, the wind field tightened up around the center, and thunderstorms started organizing near and west of the core. That's a warm-core signature, and once NHC saw that blend of tropical structure wrapped around a system that still has some non-tropical DNA, they called it what it is: subtropical. Think of it as a storm caught between two family trees.
Why it matters for tonight's lineup
Connecticut is on the list of states feeling some effect from Josephine's broad wind field tonight, mostly in the form of gusty breezes and scattered showers pushing onshore. That's exactly the kind of night that can turn a women's soccer match, like the Quinnipiac-Fairfield matchup happening in Fairfield this evening, into a battle against the wind as much as the other team. Nothing dangerous, nothing that should cancel a game, but if you're out there in the stands, zip the jacket up.
Further up the coast, Cape Cod is the headline act. The RHY impact model has it in the "Action" tier, meaning storm winds could arrive any time now, with the worst of it wrapping up by Thursday night. Sable Island off Nova Scotia is actually catching the sharpest end of this, with up to a 1 in 10 shot at hurricane-force gusts, but that's well offshore and not a U.S. concern.
The good news: Josephine is forecast to keep sliding northeast, away from the United States entirely. This isn't a storm that's going to ruin your weekend plans. It's a storm that's going to make tonight and tomorrow breezy and a little soggy along the immediate coast, then get out of the way.
Meanwhile, out West
While New England deals with Josephine, Arizona just wrapped up an Enhanced Risk day of severe thunderstorms around Flagstaff, Payson, and Sedona, with large hail, a few tornadoes, and damaging winds all in play. That risk steps down to a more contained Slight Risk Thursday focused on the Tucson, Globe, and Oracle corridor. It's been that kind of October for the Southwest, following the tornado near Deming and that 77 mph wind gust near Rodeo, New Mexico, just last week.
The quiet corner of the map
If you're headed to Austin this weekend for the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix, or you've got Breeders' Cup travel on the calendar for Lexington later this month, take some comfort in this: a broad ridge of high pressure is holding down the eastern two-thirds of the country right now, and forecasters are calling Thursday and Friday genuinely BEAUTIFUL-tier days across a corridor from the Plains through the Ohio Valley and into the Mid-Atlantic. Dry air, light wind, clean skies. That's about as good as fall weather gets.
The takeaway
Josephine is a reminder that tropical season doesn't read the calendar, and it doesn't care that the NBA tipped off last night. Coastal New England gets a blustery, damp Wednesday and Thursday, the rest of the country mostly gets a gift of clear autumn air, and the Southwest keeps doing what it's done most of October: throwing hail at anybody who sticks around too long.
https://ryanhallyall.com/blog/josephine-shows-up-uninvited-to-new-englands-midweek-game-night