Why Tropical Storm Debby is expected to stall over the Southeast

AccuWeather

Debby may have made landfall in Florida, but the worst impacts of this hurricane are expected in the days to come as it dumps massive amounts of rain in Georgia and the Carolinas.

Transcript

00:00We're going to check in with our lead hurricane expert and forecaster Alex DaSilva who is

00:07joining us now and we're looking at the latest with Debbie as it continues to work its way

00:13northward. It's weakened quite a bit though too now. Yeah it has weakened but we're really seeing

00:17those rainfall totals start to add up across the panhandle of Florida. Northeastern panhandle of

00:22Florida widespread four to eight inches already and I think that's just the beginning especially

00:28as the storm will be moving out over the ocean again tomorrow evening and then really dumping

00:33the rain there in the Carolinas and across coastal Georgia as well. And part of the reason for this

00:39storm to kind of get hung up because we know it came ashore as a hurricane weakened a little bit

00:44it started to make that slower movement now just seven miles per hour to the north

00:49northeast. Part of the slow movement is because there's not a lot of pulling forces on it.

00:54Yeah earlier today it was really being pulled to the north and east by a dip in the jet stream

00:59that we have currently over Ohio and Ohio Valley but what's happening is that dip in the jet stream

01:04is leaving it's leaving the storm behind and so that's why we're starting to see the storms

01:09forward speed begin to slow. What's going to happen is that high pressure to the east over

01:13the Atlantic that's going to come west a little bit and it's essentially going to trap the storm

01:19somewhere off the Georgia South Carolina coast and so it's going to stall there for about 24

01:23to 48 hours moving very very little and I think that's really where we could see the catastrophic

01:29flooding where we could see one to two feet of rain in some areas in that area in that area.

01:35Yeah our eye path currently has it in the Carolinas along the Carolina coastline through

01:41Thursday evening then from Friday, Saturday, Sunday looks like a wet weekend for a lot of

01:45popular east coast beaches. Yeah this storm will affect almost everybody on the east coast to some

01:50degree after the storm is done stalling Debbie's going to be picked up and pulled to the north by

01:55another incoming storm and so what we're going to see is we're going to see an enhancement of

01:59precipitation as the storm moves up through the mid-Atlantic and into the northeast but first

02:04across the southeast this is where we're really expecting the devastating flooding to occur

02:09you know Savannah, Charleston, Myrtle Beach this is the area we're most concerned about devastating

02:14to catastrophic flooding again one to two feet of rain is certainly on the table in a lot of

02:20those areas then the storm moves up into New England this weekend where we could still see

02:24some pretty significant flooding right now calling for two to four inches widespread across the I-95

02:30corridor however if the storm moves a little bit more to the north and west we may need to bump up

02:35some of those totals. We'll be keeping a close eye on that of course that's still days down the line

02:41are focusing on the Carolinas first too well thank you Alex for covering it all and we'll

02:45continue to check in with you as we go through this week undoubtedly.

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