Atlantic Canada's history of hurricanes

AccuWeather

As Hurricane Ernesto continues to track north across the Atlantic towards Canada, AccuWeather's Bernie Rayno and Brett Anderson look back on past hurricanes that impacted the Canadian Atlantic coast.

Transcript

00:00As these systems move north, you know, I think of a lot of people are surprised that while they tend

00:06to lose wind intensity because of the wind shear in the cooler waters, Brett, they could still have

00:11a huge impact on Atlantic Canada. Yeah, because what's going to happen is this goes into a

00:19transition, basically losing tropical characteristics, moving, basically turning into more of

00:24like a winter type storm, the wind field expands, and when the wind field expands, we get more

00:30impact, and some of that impact is going to reach all the way up into Nova Scotia on Monday with

00:34some wind gusts, perhaps over 40 miles per hour, some rough seas as well, and then the strong

00:40impacts are going to certainly reach Newfoundland, looks like by Monday night, where we are expecting

00:4560 to 80 mile per hour winds, even though the center of the storm is going to be still offshore.

00:51And when you, again, let's take a look at that structure again of Ernesto, you could see how

00:56it's really starting to stretch out and starting to weaken, so this is something that we mentioned

01:03we see a lot, Brett. Really quickly here, let's talk about some of the more infamous hurricanes

01:12that have struck eastern Canada here over the last several years here. In fact, here's the graphic

01:20we were talking off air, the benchmark for at least Halifax was Hurricane Juan, that was back

01:29in 2003. Talk about the impacts that Nova Scotia and Halifax felt with that storm. Yeah, that was

01:36a devastating storm, a tremendous storm surge into the Halifax harbor, and they saw wind gusts over

01:44100 miles per hour, widespread damage, that was just a direct hit. The problem with that one was

01:50Juan was still strengthening as it was moving north of 40 degrees north, which was unusual,

01:56and it was moving fast, so it didn't give time for it to really weaken as it got up into those

02:01colder waters closer to Halifax. And then we have Fiona back in 2022, farther east, not as much

02:09impact, but for eastern Nova Scotia we saw wind gusts in excess of 100 miles per hour, and again

02:15some significant storm surge. And of course we are tracking Ernesto going southeast of Nova Scotia.

02:22What's the benchmark storm for, I should say, southeastern Newfoundland? What's the benchmark

02:29storm for Newfoundland? Yeah, it's Hurricane Igor back in 2010, really a big rainmaker for the

02:38Avalon Peninsula in southeastern Newfoundland. We had over nine inches of rainfall, tremendous

02:43amount of flooding with that storm, main reason being because it interacted with another front to

02:48the north, causing all that heavy rainfall. In this case, we're not going to have that type of

02:53interaction, so we're expecting more like two to four inches of rain across the Avalon Peninsula,

02:59again especially late Monday and Monday night, so there will be flooding, but not nearly as

03:04significant as what we saw with Igor. All right, Accuweather's meteorologist Brett Ansersen,

03:10our Canadian expert. Brett, thanks for the information.

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