With a mean Great Basin ridge and Great Lakes to Ohio Valley trough and lows sweeping over the Great Lakes into the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic, waves of Gulf and Caribbean moisture have frequently lifted north. With tropical air meeting incoming fronts from the west, major rainfall and flood events have been common place since June 1 from Richmond, VA up into southern New York state.

Excerpt from wunderground.com

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, has measured 36.85 inches of precipitation, topping the previous record set in 1945, when the area recorded its wettest July on record.

An impressive 60.83 inches of precipitation have fallen in Wilmington, North Carolina, so far in 2018, easily beating the previous year-to-date record of 51.38 inches set in 1966.

For Richmond and Luray, Virginia, as well as Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, 2018 has, so far, been the rainiest year on record.

The wettest year-to-date record broken in Harrisburg was previously set in 1972, incredible rainfall totals were produced by Hurricane Agnes. This new rainfall record through Aug. 15 of 41.53 inches has topped the previous record by less than 0.1 inches.

Hurricane Agnes made its U.S. landfall in the Florida Panhandle before emerging off the North Carolina coast and then tracking northwestward over the Northeast.

Rainfall totals reached 19 inches in Western Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, just to the northeast of Harrisburg.

Why so wet?

The three key ingredients of heat, enhanced humidity and fronts have never been far away from each other. The likely enhancement of these rains can undoubtedly be attributed to record warm SST’s off and against the East Coast, fueling an already moisture rich atmosphere.

It’s been a pattern on repeat all summer long.

Several cities in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast are headed for their wettest year as well as summer on record.

https://twitter.com/chris_sowers/status/1029668136310767616

https://twitter.com/Accu_Jesse/status/1029380211576594432

https://twitter.com/Accu_Jesse/status/1029445562993700866

 

As well as those rains, the warm water offshore has helped increase humidity and therefore nights have remained unusually, if not record warm.

https://twitter.com/ericfisher/status/1031180941878804481

https://twitter.com/NWSCaribou/status/1024192309930418176

Tags: northeast flooding, northeast rain, northeast wet pattern, record wet summer, record wet year, wet summer