Active Weather
Two separate outlooks cover New York and New Jersey today. The Storm Prediction Center has a slight risk of severe thunderstorms running from the eastern Ohio Valley to the Mid-Atlantic coastline. Within that area the probabilities are 15 percent for damaging wind, 15 percent for large hail, and 2 percent for a tornado, each measured within 25 miles of any given point.
In plain terms: scattered storms, some of them strong enough to bring down limbs and cause local power outages, with hail possible and a tornado unlikely but not ruled out.
The Weather Prediction Center separately places the northern Mid-Atlantic inside a slight risk of excessive rainfall, with localized totals up to about 3 inches. The Storm Prediction Center notes storms may develop along differential heating zones and sustain themselves over high dewpoint air, which is the pattern that produces one very wet town and a dry one beside it.
The practical actions are small. Charge your phone before the afternoon, bring in anything on a balcony or deck that a 50 mile per hour gust would move, and give yourself extra time if you commute through an area that floods at the same underpass every year. Do not drive into water across a road, per the National Weather Service's Turn Around, Don't Drown guidance.
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have no severe weather or excessive rainfall risk area drawn over them today.
Infrastructure
No grid emergencies or water system disruptions are reported across the region. The National Interagency Fire Center's September 1 situation report lists no large uncontained fires in New York or New Jersey.
Power outages are the realistic infrastructure item today, and they would come from this afternoon's storms rather than from anything currently in progress.
Public Health
No public health advisories specific to the Mid-Atlantic were confirmed this run. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Health Alert Network archive could not be read without JavaScript, so this brief makes no claim about national health advisories in either direction.
Watch Item
For Puerto Rico, drought is the item with the longer arc. The United States Drought Monitor released September 2, using data through August 25, listed Puerto Rico among the areas where conditions worsened over the period. Across the lower 48 states, 56.61 percent of the land area is in drought and 43 states have at least moderate drought somewhere inside them.
Drought on an island reaches households through the water utility rather than through a reservoir map, and it usually arrives as scheduled service interruptions before it arrives as anything more. A household with a few days of stored drinking water absorbs that without changing its plans.
For New York and New Jersey, the tropical picture is quiet in a way that is worth using. The National Hurricane Center's two day and seven day outlooks both show no Atlantic disturbances as of this morning. Coastal and riverine flood zones in both states have the same September task: confirm flood insurance status, since new policies generally carry a waiting period, and know your evacuation zone before there is a reason to look it up.
After today the pattern is expected to move on. Nothing in the current outlooks points to a multi-day severe weather stretch here.
Explore Today
Water, light, food, and a plan. The version you build on a calm Thursday is the one that works.
Flood zones, evacuation routes, and what your specific address is exposed to.
Storage and treatment, which is the part of drought that reaches a household first.