Rainstorms, Floods Dominated Hudson Valley Weather In 2023

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — 2023 was an extremely wet year in the Hudson Valley, and December was a big contributor.

Take the Dec. 18 storm. Three Mesonet weather stations in the Hudson Valley set their all-time record wettest 24 hours.

"To me that’s a big deal," Nick Bassill, Director of the NY State Weather Risk Communication Center, told Patch. "You don’t think of a December rainstorm as producing the wettest day in the last seven years."

Longer-running climate stations like Poughkeepsie are on pace to have their wettest calendar year, he said.

"For 2023 in particular, precipitation is the main story," he said.

Mesonet New York is pretty new, and the Weather Risk Communication Center is even newer. The former is a network of 126 weather stations across the state, set up seven years ago with at least one site in every county and borough, providing the state an early warning weather detection system so resources can be deployed where needed. The other started in December.

Mesonet is not a forecasting tool, Bassill emphasized. "It can help indirectly with making forecasts but it’s designed to be the best possible tool at telling you what’s happening right now and what has happened in the past."

If rain is falling at 2 inches per hour in a neighborhood where the ground is already saturated from the last drenching, the Weather Risk Communication Center watching Mesonet can tell first responders where to stage before the first flooding report comes in.

Also, he said, "when people are rebuilding, and it comes to requesting disaster assistance, you often need to demonstrate that the weather you’re saying happened actually happened. Anecdotes are not enough."

According to Mesonet, most of the Hudson Valley had 40+ inches of rain in the last six months — "which is a lot," Bassill said. "For a lot of those spots that’s about the average yearly rainfall. Basically they've seen about a year’s worth of rain in the last six months."

In July, it rained and rained. On July 9, the region received up to 8 inches of rain, causing flash flooding that killed one person and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of public and private damage. Five days later, the HV was drenched with up to 3 inches. Then a storm July 16 dropped another 2 inches of rain on the already-saturated valley.

We had more significant rainstorm flooding at the end of September. The region received more than three times the usual amount of rain for the month, and almost a third of that came in two days. (How wet was it? At LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, September was the wettest on record. Each received more than 300 percent of the normal September rainfall.)

SEE: Hard Work Of Flood Recovery As Attention Moves To The Next Storm

Still, the wild weather in the Hudson Valley in 2023 included more than rain.

A deadly tornado outbreak across several states at the end of March brought severe weather to the Hudson Valley as well, and a tornado did touch down in April. Also in April, we had record-breaking high temperatures.

Then the area suffered from the worst air quality in 25 years because of smoke from Canadian wildfires.

"Which shows you how different the weather can be — That was caused by forests burning on the other side of the border. We didn’t experience that kind of dryness here, but Canada did," Bassill said.

In 2023, there were about 6,500 forest fires in Canada, shattering the previous annual record nearly three times over, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Smoke from some of those wildfires blanketed the Hudson Valley several times in 2023. The first, and worst, was at the beginning of June.

"Outdoors is dangerous in just about every part of our state, not just vulnerable communities, but literally everyone," Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a news conference at the time. "We normally are accustomed to talking about children, babies, people with compromised immune systems, senior citizens, but this is something that's having an effect on everyone."

The smoke returned to a lesser extent in mid-June and again at the end of the month.

SEE ALSO:

• Hudson Valley Inundated With Rain: September - And Summer - Of 2023
• HV Flood Timeline July 9: People Trapped, Cars Flood, Roads Collapse
• Lee Ushers In Hudson Valley Weekend With Gusty Winds, Coastal Flooding
• Ophelia To Bring The Hudson Valley Gusty Winds, Heavy Rain