New Hampshire Weather

We like to think of our weather as being local and self-contained, which is another way of saying we often forget we live on a big ball and that our weather almost always originates somewhere else. An odd but seemingly often-forgotten thing about New Hampshire's weather is that it is heavily influenced by two factors: the first being the Appalachian Mountains which ripple through the state, and secondly, the Atlantic Ocean which forms an important part of New Hampshire's nubby little ocean-front shoreline. These two factors make themselves most apparent in New Hampshire's weather in the winter when storms blow up the coast but are held just offshore by pressure systems unable to cross the inland mountains, and rotate counter-clockwise so that the prevailing winds come from the northeast rather than the more usual southwest -- hence, a Nor'easter storm -- which can dump lots of rain or snow on New England. However, the ocean in particular becomes important, as we're about to learn again this weekend, apparently, when one takes the macro view and realizes that New Hampshire isn't really all that far, in global terms, from the Caribbean. This fact is important to New Hampshirites this week because Hurricane Earl, a category 4 hurricane with 130 mph+ winds, may be coming for a visit. A hurricane in New England? Aren't hurricanes only in the tropics? For the most part, yes, but most hurricanes form in the Caribbean and get jostled around a lot by both internal and external forces which put them on a meandering course like a drunken monkey, but on occasion, one manages to wander straight up the U.S. coast, and a tiny few have even made a beeline for New England.

In September, 1938 exactly that happened as a category 5 hurricane (they didn't name them in those days) followed the U.S. coast northward, crossing Long Island causing lots of flooding and damage before making landfall in New Haven, CT and continuing northward (by now as a category 3 storm) up the Connecticut River valley, which forms most of the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. It continued into Quebec, where it finally petered out. This hurricane managed to kill 600 New Englanders and damage some 25,000 homes. The Monadnock region of New Hampshire was utterly devastated by flooding and post-storm fires about which fire departments could often do little. To give you an example of that flooding, I was shocked once while picking vegetables at an outdoor fresh vegetable market located on the side of Temple Mountain near Peterborough, NH when I turned around and saw an official historical sign indicating that during the Great Hurricane of 1938 (as it's now called), this sign stands at what was the high-water mark for the flooding. Let me repeat; I was standing on the side of a mountain reading this, with a beautiful vista view of the valley below.

For now, it appears Earl is likely to stay a hundred miles or so off New Hampshire's coast, giving us some rain and higher winds but nothing quite like the experience of 1938. Still, the reality is that it is a short, straight line from the Caribbean to New England, and that sooner or later, another powerful storm will indeed someday waddle up the coast and dump heavily on New England.