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.
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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.