Will Hurricane Florence Hit DC?

WASHINGTON, DC -- Hurricane Florence remains well off the East Coast of the United States, churning in the Atlantic at least a week away from making landfall (if it does so at all). But right now, early indications show that D.C. is right in the hurricane's crosshairs.

Obviously, the impact of a hurricane here would not be anywhere near as devastating as it would be to a coastal city like Miami, since we have a nice wide buffer of land between us and the sea. But a hurricane that hit us directly enough could still bring tropical storm-force winds and flooding.

The likelihood of Florence, likely to be a major hurricane next week, striking the United States continues to grow. Currently, the cone of uncertainty stretches from the North/South Carolina border all the way up to Boston, with D.C. and the Chesapeake Bay right in the center, as you can see from the graphic below.

Rain chances up for the weekend. Potentially staying active next week. #StormWatch7 is tracking Gordon's rain & where the next system in the Atlantic could move. #HurricaneFlorence The window wide with high uncertainty now. #GMW pic.twitter.com/7p7yjFxz8w
— Veronica Johnson (@VJohnsonABC7) September 6, 2018

So just how vulnerable is the D.C. area to the impacts of a hurricane? We rarely see tropical storms to begin with, because most hurricanes that venture this far north usually just brush the coast as they roll up northward and into colder waters where they dissipate.

"Storms tracks tend to run parallel to the Gulf Stream and the winds around the Bermuda High, the semi-permanent clockwise steering current off the Southeast coast," the Washington Post noted in a 2014 story. "That’s why direct hits close to D.C. are uncommon."

Theoretically, if a powerful, high-category hurricane moved directly up the Chesapeake Bay at a high speed and into D.C. before it could weaken much, we could experience hurricane-force winds in the D.C. area, but such an event would be exceedingly rare.

"Based upon the RMS 2011 U.S. Hurricane Model, we estimate that wind speeds between 60-70 miles per hour are rare in the District of Columbia, on the order of once per hundred years,” Michael Kistler, hurricane modeler and director of Model Solutions for Risk Management Solutions, told The Huffington Post in a 2011 story. “Areas closer to the Atlantic coast have significantly higher risk from hurricane-force winds, while regions further inland have less wind risk than at the coast.”

Image: Hurricane Harvey, 2017. (Photo by Jack Fischer/NASA via Getty Images)