Delta spreads heavy rain inland while a disturbance tracks across the across the Atlantic

Delta’s winds are winding down fast as the circulation center moves out of Louisiana and across the Mid-South. Tropical moisture is spreading far north and east of the former hurricane, and will affect the Midwest then spread into the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast over the weekend.

Water levels are finally dropping in southwestern Louisiana where storm surge levels reached at least 8 feet above normal high tide. Before, the storm, many homes were only kept dry by blue tarps on the roofs put there after Hurricane Laura. So recovery, if it’s possible, will have to start again for many folks.

It’s not really unusual for the same location the get run over by more than one hurricane in the same season. Surprisingly, it happens fairly often. Sometimes the weather pattern gets into a bit of a rut.

It’s especially true if you count storms that come from different directions. In 1947, for example, two hurricanes went over Fort Lauderdale, one from the east and one from the west.  In 1906, however, two went directly over Miami, both from the southwest. And, of course, we have the examples from 2004 when hurricanes were crisscrossing Central Florida.

It was only five days ago at 8:00 a.m. on Oct. 5, that Delta became a tropical storm. It was steered by the flow around a blocking high-pressure system over Florida and the western Atlantic. That semi-permanent system this season kept the storms away from Florida and steered many into the Gulf.

A record 10 named storms made landfall in the U.S. this hurricane season, seven of them on the Gulf coast: Cristobal, Hanna, Laura, Marco, Sally, Beta, and now Delta. You never know how the blocking highs are going to roll.

Way out in the Atlantic, a large tropical disturbance is tracking slowly in the direction of the Caribbean islands. There is a slight chance that it will get organized enough to become a tropical depression or tropical storm over the next few days. After that, however a wall of hostile upper winds is forecast to block it from moving farther west.

Nothing else is pending at the moment.