Source: Corey Davis, NC CLIMATE OFFICE, 9/9/19
After a day-long trip up our coastline, Hurricane Dorian departed North Carolina with a brief landfall at Cape Hatteras and a trail of damage left behind from its winds, rain, storm surge, and even a few tornadoes.
Dorian became the state's first landfalling storm of the year and the fourth hurricane to affect the coast in the past six years. Both Arthur (2014) and Florence (2018) made landfall, and Matthew (2016) stayed just offshore but followed an overall similar track as Dorian.
Dorian's eye moves over Cape Hatteras on Friday morning, as seen by NOAA's GOES East satellite.
Thankfully, Dorian didn't arrive in North Carolina packing the same Category-5 punch with which it struck the Bahamas. After sitting nearly stationary over the island nation for two days, Dorian lost strength over the cool water it churned up, and increasing wind shear and dry air intrusion from the south and west also weakened the storm.
It reached our southern coast on Thursday afternoon at Category-2 strength, and after turning to the northeast, its eyewall grinded from Cape Fear to Cape Lookout to Cape Hatteras (as seen on radar imagery) where the eye finally made landfall around 8:35 am last Friday, according to the National Hurricane Center.
By then, it was a Category-1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph. A Coastal Marine Automated Network station at Cape Lookout recorded gusts as high as 94 mph, and an unofficial station at Cape Hatteras High School reported a gust of 101 mph.
Tropical storm-force wind gusts were measured as far inland as Rocky Mount and Fort Bragg. The high winds helped knock out power to more than 190,000 electrical customers in eastern North Carolina.
However, it wasn't wind but water that proved to be Dorian's main hazard. Nearly a foot of rain fell in northern New Hanover County, including 11.4 inches at our ECONet station in Castle Hayne and 12.2 inches from a CoCoRaHS observer on the eastern side of the city.
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