Hurricane Ian's wrath expected to end just south of Ohio

Hurricane Ian is headed right for the United States — but its remnants won't make it as far as Ohio. A high-pressure system to the north should stop Ian in its tracks in the Appalachians, according to Kirk Lombardy, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Cleveland. "Normally (hurricanes) race right up here and we get blasted with lots of wind and heavy rain," he said, but this time "we won't really see any effects at all." The Category 4 storm slammed into the shoreline near Cayo Costa, Florida, on Wednesday afternoon and caused mayhem as it crossed the Sunshine State. Models predict the storm will swing northwest, heading inland from the Atlantic Ocean and hitting Georgia and North Carolina. As it eases to a tropical depression, Ian is expected to drench parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and the southern reaches of West Virginia before grinding to a halt just shy of the Ohio River. For Lorain County, the weather service is predicting partly sunny skies through the weekend, though the autumn chill will stay, with daytime highs around 66 degrees and overnight lows in the 40s. Lombardy said there are choppy waters on Lake Erie right now, but they're part of the normal fall weather pattern. A high-pressure center coming from the northwest is meeting a low-pressure system, which is funneling wind across the Great Lakes and whipping up waves, he said. But the forecast includes no rain at all from Hurricane Ian. "Once these things come ashore, they lose that fuel, the warm water underneath them," Lombardy said. "What happens is they quickly diminish and become extratropical." Hurricane leftovers and Nor'easters are both examples of 'extratropical' storms, which thrive in low-pressure systems. They can still carry incredibly strong winds and rain. There have been times in the past that extratropical storms have been absorbed into a northern latitude weather system and actually increased in strength, Lombardy said. A good example was Hurricane Ike, which hit the Gulf Coast in September 2008 and killed at least 195 people, including seven people in Ohio as it traveled north. The National Weather Service recorded winds of 75 mph in Columbus. Ike proved at the time to be the second-costliest hurricane in United States, with damages estimated around $30 billion. Jason Hawk can be reached at (440) 329-7122 or news@lcnewspapers.com.