A flood watch is in effect through noon, Friday.
Rain continues to fall today in Clinton Square in Syracuse.Syracuse, NY – Prepare for a good soaking, Central New York.
The National Weather Service in Binghamton has issued a flood watch from 8 a.m. today through noon Friday as a storm system that has grabbed moisture from the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole slides up the Eastern Seaboard.
Some 2 to 4 inches of rain could land in the Syracuse region, the weather service said.
“The very onset has reached us,” Dan Padavona, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Binghamton office, said about 6:15 a.m. “Probably sometime between 9 a.m. and noon it’s going to increase quite a bit in intensity and it will be heavy off and on for the bulk of the day.”
About an inch of rain could fall by 2 p.m. or so, followed by 2 more inches between 2 and 8 p.m., he said. Rainfall should taper off to what he called “more normal amounts” overnight.
Anything over 0.82 inches would set a rainfall record for the date, at least since 1950, according to weather service records. That amount fell at Hancock Airport on Sept. 30, 1972.
The wet weather will be widespread, but from the way the storm is tracking a band of territory stretching from western Oneida County through Syracuse to the central Finger Lakes could get particularly wet, Padavona said.
Even more rain is expected in the lower Catskills region in southeast New York and northeast Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, he said.
There is a bright spot. So far this month only 2.60 inches of rain had fallen at Hancock Airport, 1.43 inches less than the September average. That means the ground has more capacity to absorb the heavy rain expected today than it would if the region had gotten its normal dose of precipitation for the month, Padavona said.
“If it had been a wet month we could have had major problems,“ he said.
Still, with a flood watch in effect, people should plan ahead where they are going to go if flooding hits their area, he said.
Urban areas also could be more prone to flooding.
“No matter how dry it’s been, the concrete can only take so much. It just runs right off,” Padavona said. “Storm sewers get plugged up, basements get flooded. All those sorts of things (are) just pretty much unavoidable when it rains hard.”