Erin brings heavy rain, gusty winds to the Maritimes through Thursday night

Post-tropical storm Erin is still on the way for Thursday night, but we're already seeing rain at times heavy across the Maritimes today, well ahead of the storm.

An incoming cold front is bringing its own round of rain and also helping to funnel in tropical moisture from Erin.

The storm itself will arrive Thursday night and we'll be seeing the heaviest rainfall near and to the left of Erin's track and the strongest winds to the right of the track.

Believe it or not, forecast models are still at odds with the exacttrack for Erin, ranging from a track over southeast New Brunswick to central Nova Scotia. That said,I believe the most likely track will be over southwest Nova Scotia tonight, then across P.E.I. on Friday morning.

Rainfall

Near and to the left of Erin's track, we'll likely see a widespread area with rainfall amounts in the 40-80 mm range.More than 100 mm is possible in some localized areas.

The heaviest rain will be tracking through tonight, and we could see localized pockets of 50 mm of rain ina 12-hour period. This amount of rain over such a short period of time will bring the risk for localized flash flooding.

Wind

The strongest winds with these types of storms are found near and to the right of the track. Based on the current track, the strongest winds with gusts 60-80 km/h, are looking set for the Atlantic coastline from Halifax, up the Eastern Shore and Cape Breton. Les Suetes winds could top 100 km/h. This could lead to some power outages and minor tree damage.

Nova Scotia Power has activatedits emergency operations centre, and theutility will be placing crews around the province to make sure it can respond safely and quickly to outages as needed.

Waves

We'll see some high surf and pounding waves of up to fourmeters along the Eastern Shore and for Cape Breton, overnight Thursday and into Friday morning.

I'll be keeping you posted throughout the day on the live blog, on CBC Radio and of course I'll have another update this evening at 6 p.m. on CBC-TV.

Follow the live blog

Keep up to date with our weather blog, updated every day.