Boston College Vs. Duke: Weather Update For Saturday's Game

AJ did a great job yesterday in outlining the initial weather reports for the Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina area. He outlined the possibility of hurricane conditions making an impact on the game, and he talked about how the weather's reared its head on some historical games in college football days of yore.

As he mentioned, the weather conditions are a very fluid situation, and there seems to be a shift in the forecast for the weekend. As of Thursday night, Hurricane Joaquin is now a Category 4 hurricane, battering the Bahamas while turning north from the Caribbean.

Good news is now starting to take shape for the game. After initial reports had the hurricane grazing the eastern coast of North Carolina, the National Hurricane Center now has a likely five-day forecast cone heading well off the coast of the Outer Banks.

That's good news for the BC-Duke game since Durham will no longer take a hit from the hardest bands of rain. That said, a flash food watch remains in effect through Sunday evening, and there is an expectation that some of the hardest rain will still whack the state capital area. But the bulk of the rain (anywhere between 2 and 5 inches of rain) will hit by Friday night. The forecast is calling for likely showers throughout the day on Saturday, but the torrential downpours will be less substantial.

If there's a downside to that, it's that the wind will be gusting very badly. The forecast calls for sustained winds during the game of 10 to 20 miles per hour with gusts as high as 30 miles per hour throughout Friday and Saturday.

The heaviest brunt of Hurricane Joaquin will hit the Virginia/Maryland area by the afternoon on Monday, so it's unclear if conditions will worsen throughout the game in Durham. The storm had originally thought to make landfall as a Tropical Storm (or just a TON of rain) across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Long Island, and Connecticut.

According to the cone, the area most likely to take the biggest hit is now Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts as a tropical storm. So we got that going for us, which is nice.

All I know is that I was supposed to go golfing Tuesday afternoon. Surely the good Lord wouldn't disrupt the best round of my life.