Information courtesy of James M. Arnold, weather specialist, Shrewsbury Emergency Management Agency

Sandy is now inland over southern New Jersey and moving further away from us. Our weather will be calming down overnight with one possible exception…a band of thunderstorms has formed in the warm air near Nantucket and these actually show some rotation and the National Weather Service will be watching this for isolated waterspouts and/or weak tornado activity in the warm air over southeastern Massachusetts for the next hour or two.. 

Winds will begin to diminish from here on in, and by midnight will be in the 15 to 20 mph sustained range with possible gusts to 30 or 35 mph.  Tuesday, winds will continue to be fairly strong with some potential for another burst of stronger gusts, possibly to 40 mph, during the afternoon. Showers will be prevalent through Tuesday night, but I do not see any flooding conditions developing.

Some storm statistics for our area: I saw a report that Worcester Airport had gusts consistently in the mid to high 50s and one reached 62 mph.  On the coast, Cuttyhunk Island had a peak gust of 83 mph, Wellfleet had a peak gust of 81 mph and there were numerous reports of gusts between 70 and 75 mph.  Westerly Rhode Island reported a gust to 86 mph and a high sustained wind of 64 mph. No excessive rainfall was reported, the highest I have seen is a little over 2.5 inches. Our rainfall here in Shrewsbury was just a bit over 1 inch.

Sandy made landfall with an extremely low barometric pressure at her center, reaching as low as 940 mb, which is around 27.75 on your home barometers.  This is a record, surpassing the low pressure found in the 1938 Hurricane, Hurricane Carol in 1954 or any other storm in history north of Washington D.C.  She went ashore as a Category 1 storm, with as large a wind envelope as I have ever seen, stretching nearly 1,000 miles across.  The devastation from Bridgeport south to Atlantic City and beyond, will be unimaginable in places. 

We were really very lucky, in spite of the storm effects we did get. Sandy will go into the record books as a once in a lifetime event, as she surpassed records dating back to when weather records started to be kept, generally in the late 1800s.