Fiona poised to become one of the strongest storms on record to impact the easternmost portions of Canada.
Fiona poised to become one of the strongest storms on record to impact the easternmost portions of Canada.
Days after menacing Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Turks and Caicos and other parts of the Caribbean, Fiona is now on a crash course with Atlantic Canada.
Fiona is poised to become one of the strongest storms on record to impact the easternmost portions of Canada, according to AccuWeather forecasters.
Hurricane watches and tropical storm watches were issued for parts of the Atlantic Canada coast, with the Canadian Hurricane Center warning the storm could potentially evolve into “a landmark weather event” for Eastern Canada this weekend.
Fiona is expected to bombard eastern Prince Edward Island, eastern Nova Scotia and Quebec, western Newfoundland and southeastern Labrador with life-threatening flooding and hurricane-force wind gusts.
Satellite imagery on Thursday showed that Fiona was an enormous storm with hurricane-force winds extending outward about 70 miles (110 km) from the center of the storm and tropical-storm-force winds extending 205 miles (335 km).
“Fiona will likely be the most intense storm on record, when taking into account the central pressure and the magnitude of wind gusts that are expected to strike eastern Nova Scotia through this weekend,” said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson, who routinely issues weather forecasts for Canada.
AccuWeather forecasters anticipate Fiona to make landfall as a Category 2 on Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale hurricane Saturday morning local time and bring severe impacts to the region that could be similar if not worse than Dorian’s in 2019, which was a Category 1 storm and brought widespread damage to structures and trees. More than about 500,000 people in the region lost power.
Widespread heavy downpours of 4-8 inches (100-200 mm) could occur across northern Nova Scotia and southwestern Newfoundland, with an AccuWeather Local StormMax™ of 10 inches (330mm) of rainfall possible. Rainfall of that magnitude could lead to substantial flooding.
AccuWeather experts said that although the storm is expected to move quickly through the region, if the storm were to slow down at all, it could lead to higher local rainfall totals.
“Fiona is expected to cause significant loss of leaves, which will probably have a major negative impact on the fall color in October,” Anderson explained.
The combination of flooding rainfall, destructive winds, dangerous seas and widespread power outages means that Fiona has been rated as a 4 on the AccuWeather RealImpact™ Scale for Hurricanes.
A Saildrone device that was deployed into the ocean to measure wave heights and other weather data related to Fiona reported a monster wave height of near 50 feet on Thursday as the storm tracked over the open Atlantic.
Produced in association with AccuWeather.
