Hurricane Zeta to bring record 5th LA landfall, snow to NE

Hurricane Zeta is on its way to the New Orleans area, then later will bring snow to the Northeast.

Hurricane Zeta is on its way to the New Orleans area. This will be the 5th tropical storm (named storm) to make landfall in 2020. We have two stories on it, a forecast story and a live blog, and I will post updates to Twitter and Facebook.

Previous storms this season included Tropical Storm Cristobal, Tropical Storm Marco, Hurricane Laura and Hurricane Delta. We have already tied with 2002, which holds the record for number of named storms to make landfall in Louisiana - four.

There were two years with three hurricane landfalls, a record we could tie, if Zeta hits Louisiana as a hurricane: 1860 and 2005. (1985 only counts if you are considering "storms traveling through Louisiana," not landfalls, as Hurricane Elena made landfall in Mississippi, then traveled through the eastern part of Louisiana).

Zeta is also going to combine with a frontal system that will eventually bring snow to parts of Pennsylvania through New England:

This is not, of course, the first time a hurricane has lent moisture to a storm system that dropped snow on the mountains of the Northeast. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy (if you count that storm -- it was a "post-tropical storm" when it made landfall in New Jersey) dropped up to 3 feet of snow in the Appalachians.

And back in 2005, Hurricane Wilma's moisture was drawn into a coastal storm that dropped snow from the Pennsylvania mountains into New England.

It's been a long year on the Gulf Coast, with four landfalls in Louisiana and three elsewhere in the Gulf.

Storm surge, which can cover the entire Gulf, has been up many times with these storms, but it depends highly on sensor location vs. landfall as to what the maximum surge was. Calcasieu Pass, for example, was just to the right of Hurricane Laura's landfall, in the worst possible storm surge area, and recorded its maximum reading of 8.91 feet with that storm. Eugene Island, which was east of landfall of both Delta and Laura, had their largest surge, 6.18 feet, from Delta.

Stations near New Orleans had maximums during Tropical Storm Cristobal as winds drew surge into that area, and those are the numbers that could be beaten by Hurricane Zeta (6.16 feet at Shell Beach and 4.15 feet at Bonnet Carre Spillway).

To determine this, I took the verified and preliminary readings from NOAA coastal stations between the end of May and the end of October and subtracted out the forecast (expected) tide level to come up with the storm surge.

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