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Heavy rain and overnight storms were causing flooding across central North Carolina Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon should turn warm and humid, with rain more sporadic.

Rain and storms deliver flooding, break in rain comes this afternoon

Today, we've got hurricane Helene as of the 11 o'clock update from the National Hurricane Center. It is a category one storm threading the needle between Mexico and Cuba. This is likely to become a category three by Thursday morning and then making landfall Thursday night as a category three, Florida's big bend and you see the center of the storm is moving to our south and west. It's important to remember though that this is a big storm. National Hurricane Center says it's within the 90th percentile in terms of size. So the impacts are going to be felt well to the east of the center of the storm. We're going to start to see some of the rain showers from Helene moving in on Thursday. These will start out pretty scattered during the afternoon, but they'll turn more numerous as we head into the evening and could even see a few storms try to spin in the sand hills by Thursday evening. So we'll keep a close eye on that through Friday off and on rain is likely and it's likely to move out by supper time Friday. But during that time, we have a medium risk for flooding, especially west of the Triangle. Late morning into the afternoon, there's the threat for some, uh, localized wind damage in addition to a level one risk out of five for a couple of tornadoes. Now you see the storm moving up toward the big bend of Florida and it gets tugged to the west by an area of low pressure. So that means some incredibly high rain totals in the mountains of North Carolina and the upstate of South Carolina, an extreme risk of flooding there. Most in the mountains of North Carolina see 5 to 10 inches of rain, but there will be some totals near a foot, especially in the southwester corner of the state for our purposes. 1 to 3 inches of rain looking likely. But as far as power outages are concerned, those are more likely farther to the west here. If we do see any, they're going to be pretty sporadic. Here's your seven day forecast and you see that beyond Friday, things actually start to improve for us. So the weekend's not a waste. High temperatures for the most part, 80 to 85 Saturday and Sunday.

WRAL WeatherCenter Forecast

Timing out the impacts from Helene on the WRAL viewing area

Hurricane Helene to bring rain to NC, flooding & isolated tornadoes possible Friday

Path of Helene as of Sept. 25, 2024 at 11 a.m.

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