Good afternoon everyone. Sorry that I haven’t posted anything to the home page, or the blog in the past 24 hours or so, but I’ve been busy working on putting together some video from my time lapse photography, and that I filmed at Sea Bright on Friday. I hope to have those up on the site, and in the blog soon. I’ve also been dealing with a bad back that I had mentioned to all of you earlier in the week.

The back problems I’ve had date all the way back to February 2004 when I slipped and fell outside a high school gym after covering a basketball game for my other site, GMC Hoops. The problem didn’t really start to become significant until about a year and a half later in August 2005. Since that time, I’ve had periodic bouts with this problem, but it always eventually gets better. I would have to say that this episode is perhaps the worst since the episode in August 2005. But, I’ve managed to get the home page updated just a little while ago, and plan to do another update after I get this post done, and upload my time lapse video.

In the past 24 to 36 hours, Hurricane Ike has become more of a menace in the Tropical Atlantic. Being the only show in town now with the exception of the remnants of Josephine, which are still hanging on in the Central Atlantic albeit by a thread, Ike has re-intensified as projected, and as of the 2:00 PM Advisory from the National Hurricane Center, was a Category Four Hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale with maximum sustained winds back up to 135 miles per hour. It has since weakened to 120 miles per hour.

We’ll have more on Ike in a little bit, but our focus right now is on Tropical Storm Hanna’s trip through the Garden State on Saturday. Hanna, if you recall, made landfall along the United States coast at the border between North and South Carolina at 3:20 AM on Saturday morning as a strong storm, and almost a minimal hurricane. It then rapidly moved up the East Coast of the United States with a forward speed to the Northeast at 28 miles per hour. It rolled through North Carolina during the morning hours, and was just Northeast of Williamsburg, Virginia at 2:00 PM EDT, and then at 5:00 PM EDT, the storm was just east of Cambridge Maryland.

Hanna finally started moving through New Jersey at about 8:00 PM EDT as it was located near Atlantic City, and actually increased slightly in strength to have maximum sustained winds of 55 miles per hour. As you will see in the time lapse video that I’m putting together, the weather in Central Jersey began to get wild and wooly at about 1:30 PM to 2:00 PM in the afternoon. A feeder band from Hanna had already passed through during the night, and humid conditions had prevailed early Saturday morning, but things were calm until the early afternoon.

According to the data compiled from the GWC WX Station, the high temperature reached 79.5 degrees at 12:30 PM. Rainfall amounts tallied up to 3.25 inches including 0.33 inches that fell in just a ten minute span. Winds gusted to about 13 miles per hour, but keep in mind that the weather station is in an area obstructed by houses and trees. The barometer dropped some .61 inches from Friday afternoon to Saturday evening as pressure bottomed out at 29.34 inches of Hg, or about 994 millibars. Aside from the .33 inches of rain that fell in just ten minutes during the day on Saturday, there were other intervals that saw well over a tenth of an inch of rain. The data collected from Hanna on Saturday revealed that there were 12 intervals with a tenth of an inch or more of rain.

Tropical Storm Hanna brought power outages, flooding, gusty winds, and beach erosion, but it wasn’t as bad as earlier indicated. The forecast on Friday had called for 4 to 8 inches of rain for portions of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, but actual amounts ended up between 2 to 4 inches due to the rapid movement of the storm. Rainfall amounts could have been much worse had Hanna slowed down. One of the big reasons why Floyd was such a damaging storm was the fact that it moved more slowly through the region. Sunday brought pleasant weather to Central Jersey as well as the rest of the Northeast, and you wouldn’t have known that a storm blew through a day earlier.