While Francine made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane, AccuWeather's Jon Porter also monitors a homegrown tropical system developing near the Carolinas that could impact the region.
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00:00We are going to issue a track before the National Hurricane Center because we have as many experts
00:06here as anybody in the in the field of meteorology and in this case we were so concerned because
00:13it wasn't a storm as Arielle just mentioned that was coming in off the tropical Atlantic and we
00:19had days to track it. We knew that it was going to storm form quickly and we always want to give
00:25people enough advance notice before the storm would form and of course where we thought it
00:30was going to make landfall. That's exactly the key point. We're going to provide as much advance
00:34notice as we can. We do that so that you can stay safer, keep your family safer and be best prepared.
00:40That's in our DNA here at AccuWeather. That's why we have so much passion in doing that and so yes
00:45again in this event 24 hours before the Hurricane Center and any other source on the track and also
00:51highlighting the risk. We were the only source to highlight that this could be a category two
00:57hurricane upon arrival. That was our forecast on the coastline. Of course the impacts were
01:02very significant and there was a specific reason for that John as you and I were talking about. In
01:07fact a lot of our forecasters were highlighting to me 48 hours ago that that upper low that was
01:15near Dallas would help ventilate the storm even though it was undergoing wind shear and while
01:21many sources thought that the storm had already peaked right before it made landfall that's when
01:26it tightened up and we did get a category two hurricane. Yeah that's a that is exactly what
01:31happened. That extra upward motion was really helpful as we had been talking about here on
01:36highlighting for days in advance and you're right all the all other known sources including the
01:41National Hurricane Center had said during the middle of the day yesterday that the storm peaked
01:45in intensity. We did not think that was the case because we felt it would continue to intensify
01:50and create more life-threatening impacts and that's exactly what happened. And of course that
01:54farther eastern track put New Orleans in harm's way. Boy did they get hit hard. Last night you're
01:59seeing some footage from New Orleans. Our own Allie Reed was in Kenner and her footage last night
02:04was a show the heavy rain and wind. All right let's take a look at the hurricane season so far
02:09John and you and I were talking off camera it's been very odd because early in the season in June
02:16and July you expect what we call homegrown development developing in close to the United
02:20States but that's not what happened. We had Ernesto, we had Beryl and we had Debbie which were
02:26more long track storms. Hey it was almost like a little bit of a flip of the usual hurricane season
02:32playbook right in terms of what we would be expecting. Typically you had those long track and
02:37very damaging hurricanes Beryl and Debbie in the Caribbean in the United States and of course
02:42Ernesto that caused all those problems in Bermuda up into and further north in Atlantic Canada but
02:48now we've had a couple of those storms closer in and there's going to be yet another threat for
02:53that so we're again had this theme of a supercharged September with a more active time period
03:00returning to the hurricane season and that's exactly what we've seen. Now we do have a system
03:05out in the Atlantic we just want to show it to you there it is tropical depression number seven
03:09we're not too worried about that John because that's going to be lifting as you're drawn to
03:13the north northeast. It will be a storm it will be yet another storm in September but nothing that
03:18we're concerned about but here we go again homegrown development we use that term here it's
03:24an accurate term it describes development close to the United States there's the setup on Sunday.
03:31It's a classic setup in that in that there's an area of high pressure across the northeast which
03:37is a atmospheric traffic jam that is going to have these slow moving disturbances off the
03:44Carolina coastline that we think can consolidate and produce a rainstorm perhaps a tropical rainstorm
03:50and that can move toward the Carolina or mid-Atlantic coast here as we head into early
03:55next week. Yeah there's our area John and regardless of development or not we are concerned
04:02there's going to be some heavy rain in there. That's correct that whole area really from portions
04:06of the upstate of South Carolina through southern Virginia may even be further north depending upon
04:11the storm track significant persistent rainfall flooding concerns and this can also evolve into
04:16a tropical storm landfall. All right AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jonathan Border. John thanks for joining us.