Hurricane Felicia hits Category 3; may affect Hawaii next week
As is often the case in an El Niño year, there's nothing to talk about today in the Atlantic, but the Eastern Pacific is very active. It has been 17 years since we went this long without a tropical cyclone in the Atlantic--the hurricane season of 1992 didn't start until August 16--but in the Eastern Pacific, we've already had six named storms this year. Hurricane Felicia is the latest addition, and Felicia has put on an impressive burst of intensification this morning by powering up to Category 3 status with 115 mph winds. Recent satellite loops show that Felicia has continued to intensify, with the cloud tops surrounding the eye cooling as they push higher into the troposphere.
Figure 1. Current satellite image of Hurricane Felicia.
While Felicia is an impressive hurricane now, its days of glory will be short-lived. Felicia is currently passing over a region of warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) of 28.5°C, a full 2.5°C above the 26°C threshold needed to sustain a hurricane. These warm waters also extend to great depth, as seen on the Ocean Heat Content image (Figure 2). Felicia's west-northwest track will take the storm into a region of cooler waters with lower Oceanic Heat Content beginning tonight, which should induce a steady weakening trend beginning Thursday night. By Friday morning, SSTs should fall to 26°C, and decline to 25°C by Saturday. While wind shear is expected to remain in the low to moderate range over the next five days, 5 - 15 knots, the cooler SSTs should be able to significantly weaken the hurricane. By Monday, when most of the computer models indicate that Felicia will be nearing the Hawaiian Islands, the storm will be at tropical depression strength with top winds of about 35 mph, according to the latest runs of the HWRF and GFDL models. Exactly how close Felicia will get to the Hawaiian Islands is a bit tricky to call right now, since the hurricane is interacting with nearby Tropical Storm Enrique. Whenever two storms get within 900 miles of each other, they tend to rotate around a common center in a dance called the Fujiwhara Effect. This sort of storm-storm interaction is a complicated affair not well-handled by the computer forecast models.
Figure 2. Total oceanic heat content (also called the Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential, TCHP) along the forecast path of Hurricane Felicia. The initial time of the forecast is 06 UTC (1 am EDT) on August 5, 2009. Oceanic heat content of 90 kJ per square cm is often associated with rapid intensification of hurricanes. Felicia is currently over waters with high heat content, but the heat content will steadily decrease over the next two days. Image credit: NOAA/RAMMB.
There are no areas of disturbed weather in the Atlantic worth mentioning today, and no computer models forecast tropical storm development over the next seven days.
I'll have an update on Thursday.
Jeff Masters
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Dvorak Image
Difference between then and now is that it is August.
Its in the same link I gave u before. Just click fix.
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/tropical.asp
ADVANCED DVORAK TECHNIQUE
ADT-Version 7.2.3
Tropical Cyclone Intensity Algorithm
----- Current Analysis -----
Date : 06 AUG 2009 Time : 003000 UTC
Lat : 14:45:28 N Lon : 130:06:53 W
CI# /Pressure/ Vmax
6.4 / 940.5mb/124.6kt
Final T# Adj T# Raw T#
(3hr avg)
6.4 6.7 6.7
Latitude bias adjustment to MSLP : +2.9mb
Estimated radius of max. wind based on IR : 16 km
Center Temp : +10.2C Cloud Region Temp : -70.2C
Scene Type : EYE
Positioning Method : RING/SPIRAL COMBINATION
Ocean Basin : EAST PACIFIC
Dvorak CI > MSLP Conversion Used : ATLANTIC
Tno/CI Rules : Constraint Limits : NO LIMIT
Weakening Flag : OFF
Rapid Dissipation Flag : OFF
****************************************************
Last year, Norbert was a 135mph cat 4, made two landfalls in Mexico.
Norbert of 08
Poor Enrique's getting gobbled up like a piece of delicious cake.
Wouldn't happen to be running a version of I.E. would you?
I upgraded to IE8 about a month ago and had issues here and couldn't run the sat. loops on NHC site. I had to uninstall and go back to IE7. Which fixed the problem.
I only run Firefox here now. No problems.
but all in all you should get some understanding on here.
Wilma pulled cold air down behind it and gave us clear skies before the sun went down here in Jensen Beach.[puffs out chest] I predicted it.
I have a first person account from a family memoir about the hurricane of October 1973. It was nearly identical to Wilma, including the path through the Caribbean, and the clear blue skies after it passed. They were caught while in the sawgrass swamp they were travelling through in between Jupiter and Lake Worth. GG Grandpa, GG Grandma and their 10 year old son weathered it under a 12 foot tender on a gator crawl. That hurricane pulled down a cold front bringing frost to New Orleans killing the mosquitos, stopping a yellow fever epidemic that had killed 226.. 1878 more than 4000 died.
I dont see any storm that hit florida in October of 1973
Not true, because I did it.
At 2PM, I took off from Cordova Park in Pensacola to head west to go back home to New Mexico.
The only open highway out of town was to McDavid and Atmore, AL.
It took me 3 hours to get down that highway to Interstate 65. Power was out all the way to Louisana.
And mobilegirl said Pensacola thought Ivan was going to be a Mobile storm...that's not totally accurate. There were those of us that had a strong feeling that sucker was going to keep hookin' into the panhandle.
Not to toot my own horn, but I knew exactly where this storm was going to go when it was down near Jamaica.
When I was sure Ivan would move more north before curving towards the NE (totally trashing the Tampa forecast landfall at the time,) I called my family in Pensacola and told them I was coming home for the hurricane. "What hurricane?" my Dad asked me.
By the time I got to Louisana a couple of days later, Ivan was headed for NO. The panic was palpable. Thousands of cars jammed I-10 and I-12. Awesome!
After arriving in P'cola and taking a 9-hour nap, my bro woke me up and told me that it looked like I was going to be right about Ivan.
At 12:30 AM on landfall, my last family contact, my other bro, called me from Tampa and said "Geez, Brian...it's hookin' right into Pensacola just like you said it would."
That's when the house started to shake.
Two-hours later, my scissor-cut sweatshirt was ripped off my body and I was de-pantsed in the middle of Bayou Blvd. by a 140-mph gust.
Awesome storm, savage and deadly.
what??
Today is the 5th.
Yeah, and it looks like Enrique is a pretty big cake!
Question: Can the warm moist air from Enrique sustain Felicia until it makes it's way to Hawaii on Monday or Tuesday?
ok, where in CA are you Taz?
yea i noticed that, ok so it was 1873
You talking about the IR CH 4 image he posted?
It actually has the date being the 6th on it.
no, but I was never much into baseball, aside from playing little league for a couple years
I am one of the really good ones.
Just kidding
you should really follow some of these
Weather456
StormW
leftovers is good too
I can not think of any of the names of others but there are quite a few that I listen to often. But I still give my opinion on storms :)
Question: Won't that giant feeder band still be over warmer water even though the core of Felicia heads towards cooler climes?
1) The storm glowed that night, and lightning was never seen by myself or anyone I've talked to who survived the storm. It was a ghostly glow, and was bright enough for the human eye to see the ravages of the storm that night.
2) There was a "thump-thump-thump" sound to the storm, like a diesel engine of a ghost ship. Very low hertz, but clearly audible.
Ivan was the most interesting storm I've been in to date, by far.
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