Powerful Nor’easter Makes Landfall at the Jersey Shore
A powerful nor’easter made landfall along the Jersey Shore Sunday morning, bringing major tidal flooding, strong winds and widespread power outages to parts of the coast.
The center of the storm moved ashore near Barnegat Inlet, between Barnegat Light and Island Beach State Park. Around the center, conditions briefly became calmer, with an eye-like feature showing up near parts of Ocean County.
The biggest impacts were focused along the coast rather than inland New Jersey. Monmouth and Ocean counties dealt with the strongest onshore winds, significant tidal flooding and thousands of power outages. During the late morning, about 25,000 customers were without power in Monmouth County and roughly 36,000 were out in Ocean County.
Conditions were different farther south. Atlantic and Cape May counties still experienced gusty winds and flooding, but winds became more offshore there. That helped keep wind impacts and water levels lower than farther north.
Flooding remained a concern around Barnegat Bay, where water drains more slowly than along the open coast. Areas including Toms River, Waretown, Forked River, Lacey and Manahawkin could continue seeing lingering water even after the storm begins pulling away.
Another round of heavier rain was also possible Sunday evening before the nor’easter gradually winds down.
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The biggest reason this nor’easter lingered for days can be found high above the surface, at the jet stream level.
Normally, storm systems get caught in the faster west-to-east flow of the jet stream and are pushed along. This time, the main, faster jet stream was displaced well to the north of New Jersey. Another branch of stronger upper-level winds was farther south.
In between them, a piece of upper-level energy broke away from the main flow. Meteorologists call this a closed low or cutoff low.
Think of it like a leaf breaking away from a fast-moving river and getting caught in a slow eddy. Instead of quickly moving east, this system was largely separated from the faster atmospheric winds that normally steer storms.
That allowed the low-pressure system to meander and circle around the Mid-Atlantic for several days.
The cutoff low was also unusually strong. As the surface low followed the circulation around it, the storm strengthened and eventually moved into New Jersey Sunday morning. Its slow movement helped prolong the northeast and east winds along the coast, allowing water to repeatedly pile into the Jersey Shore and back bays.
That persistence matters with tidal flooding. One high tide can cause problems, but several tidal cycles with sustained onshore flow can keep adding water faster than some bays can drain it.
Barnegat Bay is especially vulnerable to this. Water enters through relatively limited inlets and can take time to escape. That allowed elevated water levels to linger around places such as Waretown, Forked River, Toms River and Manahawkin even as conditions began changing elsewhere.
The pattern finally starts breaking down when the closed low gets close enough to the main jet stream to become absorbed back into the faster flow. In this case, that process is expected around Tuesday.
Once that happens, the atmospheric “traffic jam” breaks. The storm gets picked up by the jet stream and accelerates away from the region.
So while the surface storm produced the wind, rain and flooding people experienced, the unusual jet-stream setup is a major reason New Jersey dealt with the nor’easter for so long.
