Barometric Pressure Forecast for Paterson, New Jersey
Barometric pressure forecast for Paterson, New Jersey — at the Great Falls of the Passaic in Passaic County, beneath the Watchung ridges. See current barometric pressure and what it means for weather-sensitive people.
Download Pressure Pal to track barometric pressure and get migraine alerts for Paterson and your area.
Pressure and weather in Paterson
Paterson grew up around the seventy-seven-foot drop of the Great Falls, where the Passaic saws through a gap in the First Watchung basalt, and the city spreads from the river's hundred-foot terrace up the flank of Garret Mountain to nearly five hundred feet within two miles. That vertical range is enough to matter. In a marginal winter storm the higher neighbourhoods can be collecting snow while downtown along the river takes sleet or cold rain, and the gap itself accelerates the northwest wind behind a departing low into gusts noticeably stronger than neighbouring towns record. The pressure movement comes overwhelmingly from two sources. Winter coastal lows tracking up the seaboard produce falls of twenty-five to thirty-five hPa across a day and a half and account for the year's heaviest snow. Between late August and early October, tropical systems decaying as they move north produce a broad slowly deepening minimum whose rainfall is the real hazard, because the Passaic drains a large heavily paved basin upstream and empties through a constricted channel, so the crest reaches the city a day or more after the rain has ended, as it did after Floyd and after Ida. Summer afternoons bring ordinary air-mass thunderstorms with little barometric warning, over an urban heat island that holds nights several degrees above the outlying valleys.
What this means for you
Two seasons account for nearly every large swing on the local record, and both carry a flood risk with them. A barometric pressure forecast checked two days ahead of a coastal system warns earlier than the sky does.