Active Weather
One small item, and it is a tide rather than a storm. The National Weather Service active alert feed, read at 1:01 this morning Eastern time, shows three active alerts in Maryland and none in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or West Virginia.
The Maryland alerts are coastal flood advisories. The one covering the Anne Arundel County shoreline calls for up to half a foot of water above ground level in low lying areas from tidal flooding, until 7:00 this morning Eastern time, worst around high tide.
A coastal flood advisory is the lowest of the three coastal flooding products. It means nuisance flooding is expected: water over the low end of a parking lot, water across the road at the bottom of a boat ramp, water in the yard of the house that always gets water. It is not a warning, and it does not call for anyone to leave.
In practical terms, half a foot of water is enough to reach the underside of a car and enough to hide what is under it. If your commute crosses a shoreline road that is known to take water at high tide, the useful move is to leave a few minutes early and take the other way rather than to judge the depth from the driver's seat.
The Storm Prediction Center places no severe thunderstorm risk over any part of the region today, and the Weather Prediction Center carries no excessive rainfall risk area here through Wednesday morning.
Infrastructure
No large wildfires are burning in any of the six jurisdictions on the National Interagency Fire Center's current incident list.
The national wildfire preparedness level is 4 on a five step scale, set September 4 at 7:30 in the morning Mountain time, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Its national fire news page, current September 7, counts 65 large fires with 15,855 firefighters and support staff assigned, and 53,233 fires for 8,303,398 acres so far this year.
No new federal disaster declarations for the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or West Virginia appear in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's declarations record since the middle of August.
Tidal flooding of this size does not usually affect power or water service. It affects roads, and it affects anything stored at ground level near the water.
Public Health
No air quality alerts are active in the region.
No boil water advisories were identified.
One note that goes with any tidal flooding: water that comes up through a storm drain or over a bulkhead is not clean water. If it gets on skin, wash it off. If it gets into a basement, the cleanup is a bleach and ventilation job rather than a mop and go job.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Alert Network archive could not be read this run, so this brief makes no claim about national health advisories in either direction.
Watch Item
The next three days are the ones to plan around. The Weather Prediction Center's extended discussion, issued at 1:41 yesterday afternoon Eastern time, has a low pressure system over eastern Canada pushing a cold front across the Midwest and the Northeast, triggering showers and thunderstorms from the Mid-Atlantic into the Ohio Valley Wednesday into Thursday.
The center calls out two places where rain could pile up: the Ohio Valley, where the front runs into unusually moist air, and the central Appalachians, where terrain squeezes more rain out of the same system. For this region that points at western Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and West Virginia rather than the coastal plain. The front is expected to move through quickly, which is the reason the center expects flash flooding to stay limited.
Beyond the front, the Atlantic is quiet. The National Hurricane Center expects no tropical development anywhere in the basin for seven days, which for the second week of September is worth noticing.
The practical use of a clear week at the peak of the season is the thing that takes an hour and then never has to be done again. Photograph the contents of each room on your phone, including the inside of closets, and email the photos to yourself. If you ever have to file an insurance claim on water damage, that hour is the difference between a list you remember and a list you can prove.
For anyone on the tidal shoreline, the fall pattern of higher than normal tides continues through the autumn. The advisory this morning is the ordinary version of it.
Explore Today
How to find out whether your address floods, and what to move first if it does.
Coastal storm readiness for the Chesapeake and the Atlantic shore.
Look up the hazards that actually apply where you live.