Hurricane fallout should affect Butler County lightly
Hurricane Ian made landfall more than 1,100 miles from Butler on Wednesday, but its effects still will be felt in Western Pennsylvania.
According to a meteorologist with National Weather Service of Pittsburgh, the Category 3 hurricane’s projected trajectory won’t make as much of an impact as past hurricanes have.
“At this point, there is not a lot of rain predicted to hit Western Pennsylvania,” said meteorologist Lee Hendricks. “For our area, the general effect is (the weather system’s) push along the East Coast, and it slows down weather systems farther to the west. That slows down our weather pattern, so we’ll keep in a relatively cool area.”
Hendricks said Ian is predicted to move across the breadth of Florida into the western Atlantic, where its residue will come back ashore into North Carolina and northeast Tennessee, where it will finally slow down and dissipate.
It should be over by Sunday morning, and the local weather pattern will reflect the effects that afternoon.
“We're talking really Sunday evening into the day Monday,” Hendricks said. “The front has already passed us, and it's stalling out around New Jersey, and that will absorb the remnants. Anything approaching us will probably be stacked up.”
Hendricks also said temperatures this month have been generally cooler than they were a year ago, but that is not necessarily affected by tropical storms. On Sept. 27, 2021, the high was a high of 74 and low of 55, and this year the high temperature didn’t even break 60 degrees.
As Hendricks put it plainly, “Summer is officially over.”
“It was a lot warmer last year,” Hendricks said. “The high temperature for the month last year was 85. High this year for September was 84, and we hit 83 degrees as recently as Sept. 21.”
Hendricks said temperatures this weekend likely will stay in the 40- to 60-degree range, but any prediction more than 48 hours out should be taken with a grain of salt.
