Yikes. Half of Florida is covered by clouds from Irma already.
As predicted, Irma is intensifying in the warm waters north of Cuba. Dr. Maue has been very accurate though both Harvey and Irma (not to mention many others), but in this case I hope his opinion is dead-wrong.
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/906593393840721923
In other news:
Based on #Irma's satellite presentation and recent pressure estimates from Hurricane Hunters, it appears to be wasting no time reorganizing. pic.twitter.com/vecB9miF76
— Michael Lowry (@MichaelRLowry) September 9, 2017
Some comparison, size matters:
How does #Irma's size compare w/ Charley (2004)? Irma's hurricane-force winds extend out ~3 times farther than Charley's did at landfall. pic.twitter.com/hZFvm96hjg
— Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach) September 9, 2017
UPDATE:
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/906713628895842306
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What a monster. Pressure dropping again. If Dr. Maue and Joe Bastardi are right this storm will be talked about for a very long time.
Lying scuzzbag Mikey Mann will dine out on it for years to come, and none dare ask him about the 12 seasons without any major land-falling US hurricanes.
Why would anyone that doesn’t have to misfortune to be in one of his classes be afraid of that little turd? He is afraid to debate and only makes bombastic statements and give lectures. The only time he seems to publically get questioned is before a congressional committee! Little wimp has probably blocked more people on his twitter account than he has followers.
He is quick to sue, but delays forever when countersued.
He will regret suing Steyn.
Like all bullies, especially little bullies, he can dish it out but can’t take it.
who gives a damn what Mickey mann may say in years to come or what you think he may say? There is a major storm heading for landfall and its going to be destructive.
Having defied most modellers and predictions in turning very late to make its northward turn, it now looks to be heading back to a more central hit on south Florida .
http://weather.cod.edu/satrad/exper/?parms=meso1-07-24-1-100
Current heading at time of posting looks like NNE.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/05/us/hurricane-irma-map.html?mcubz=0
While latest track predictions show it just brushing the west coast near St Petersburg the current movement will take it on a much more central path into the Everglades.
BTW, click that map to get current path prediction, the still is from days ago.
Don’t forget Loony Limbaugh and his advice to ignore hurricane warning. Apparently such warnings are a Liberal plot. Interestingly he has legged it out of Florida pretty quickly though.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/irma-hurricane-rush-limbaugh-climate-change-conspiracy-sell-batteries-radio-latest-news-a7932976.html
Actually tracking now to hit the Keys east of Key West. The feature that has caused the turn eating into the convective bands on the storms west side. Seeing that makes it less likely it will reach CAT 5 before landfall I think.
Going straight to Houston.
About five decades ago a contract employee working at the Johnson Space Center showed me a map of strike probabilities of hurricanes located in various parts of the tropical and sub tropical Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea. The distant location that had the best chances of hitting the Texas coast was located in the Florida Straights. The probabilities were based on past hurricane history.
Going to be interesting what happens overnight(day for E Hemi)
Looks like the center is poised to pass must north of Veradero Cuba. It has been moving directly west since two P.M. according to the readar picture I have been watching. The NWS track posted then placed the track through the center of Tampa at that time. They said it would heading WNW and projected a nearly immediate radical turn to the north. This storm just keeps moving west of the projections. The trend of discarded tracks have steadily have been moving west. It has missed the turn to hit Miami. Now it looks like it is trending to do the same with Tampa. If I lived in Pensacola I just might be starting to feel just a little nervous. And If I lived in Mobile I might be sitting up straighter and looking closer. Storms in the Florida Straits have been known to track rather well to the west for a time.
It is a monster. What I keep wondering is how it is going to make almost a 90-degree turn north? What has the ability to make something this massive “turn on a dime”. The modeled paths look almost like a “hockey stick” to me?
I was in Atlanta for Opal in 1995, not a fun time.
Regardless, my prayers are for everybody in its path.
The low pressure system that dove thru TX on Wed is rotating counter clockwise over Mississippi-ish. This will turn Irma to the north.
Have a look here..you can see the resistance causing the already started turn.
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/floaters/11L/html5-wv-long.html
Here’s another view. Really impressive how it starts to ‘walk up’ the resistance wall.
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/floaters/11L/imagery/rb-animated.gif
Now about the only thing that may slow it’s development a little is an eye wall replacement cycle which is appears may be happening.
It’s night time, so it will likely strengthen as the tropopause-stratosphere boundary drops a bit and it cools as the sunshine is gone.
I don’t see any eye any more, but it seems the remains are going back to Atlantic. Could it reform there?
NOAA says the eye is on the west coast of the panhandle. So not going to Atlantic, it is only rain that’s going there. They still claim it is a hurricane, but you can’t see that in the map above any more. The eye has opened up and is not rotating.
The graphic at NOAA was upgraded to say it is a storm. There is an eyeish center that’s on the Atlantic now, far from the reported center. Weird.
So care to update your comment now? Its been tracking due north for quite a few hours now. All credit to the long range model forecasts I would say.
Have been wondering if the track would be further west than predicted e.g. into the Gulf. The track has been generally westward so far (now roughly WNW) and strong winds are coming from the north east so will Irma swing nearly 90deg to track straight through Florida?
I’m no meteorologist but am following this closely on windy.com:-
https://www.windy.com/?20.530,-71.147,5
Ouch. This part is going to hurt. Godspeed to those who have to deal with tonight and tomorrow.
Miami and Ft. Lauderdale have been spared, but Tampa, St. Pete, etc. are in for a rough time.
Am monitoring NOAA buoys in the keys and south FL, and seems like many are off line or broke.
The ones that appear broken, seem to fail in under 50kts of wind.
Take some notes and screen shots. There has been a pattern for several years. With the way Irma has been presented there will most likely be a lot of high level CYA. I hope Irma is a squib but many are likely praying for the disaster they forecast.
mod – yes
Hmm . . I’m seeing some people online talk about low (considering) wind speeds reported in Cuba, and inconsistent radar info . . as though some sort of pysop intended to scare the heck out of us is perhaps being played out . . ????
Not pysop. Just playing with numbers to create an impression.
Strange a PWS at Marathon airport is up and running after a 77MPH gust. Just 1 gust.
But the NHC says hurricane force winds have hit the keys. Guess a gust is all that is needed.
Can’t find any buoy stations that indicate anything above 60 kts, and most are in the 30s and 40s.
[PWS = ??? (Private Weather Station) ? .mod]
“Not pysop. Just playing with numbers to create an impression.”
Put options come to mind . . .
This is the most creepy stuff I’ve seen thus far;
John, Is she single?
Radar seems to indicate the long awaited turn to the north is finally happening. Nothing to stop it from strengthening now.
It does appear to be turning. It has slowed to 7 mph from 9 mph, pressure is slightly falling yet wind speed is also falling. Eye wall replacement cycle?
Wish it would just turn south and self destruct!
I have to say I’m a wee bit confused –
“Satellite objective intensity estimate from Auto Dvorak went from 5 to 6 in . .
.”
As far as I know, the usual intensity scale (Saffir-Simpson, I think) only goes as far as 5. Obviously, someone may have a scale which goes from 1 to 100, and claim that this hurricane is “unprecedented. Look, it’s a category 14 . . ”
– according to the Mike Flynn Hurricane Assessment Algorithm, which no-one’s ever heard of.
Why use Auto Dvorak? Bigger, more terrifying number? A “normal” category 5 is quite scary enough, thank you very much.
Cheers.
Auto Dvorak is a method of estimating hurricane strength from satellite imagery alone. The intensity numbers so derived gave been calibrated against aircraft observation.
Here is a quick explanation by Chris Landsea.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/H1.html
Wikipedia has a description of the Dvorak Technique. It is an alternate method of rating hurricanes.
These hurricane scales go to 11.
I’ve been following the storm tracks on Weather Underground. The motion of the center of the storm has been gradually slowing. Two days ago the center was moving at 16 MPH. Now (10pm Eastern time) it’s just 6 MPH.
Creedence Clearwater Revival: “Bad Moon Rising”
Lyrics:
I see a bad moon a-rising
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin’
I see bad times today
Don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
There’s a bad moon on the rise
I hear hurricanes a-blowing
I know the end is coming soon
I fear rivers over flowing
I hear the voice of rage and ruin
Don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
There’s a bad moon on the rise
I hope you got your things together
I hope you are quit prepared to die
Look’s like we’re in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye
Oh don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
There’s a bad moon on the rise
There’s a bad moon on the rise
I hope everyone got their things together and got out of Dodge.
Always thought there was “a bathroom on the right”???/sarc
Am still of the view that this hurricane will track more westwards then the models are suggesting.
Noting the way the winds are blowing between the surface and 250 hPa. lts only the winds at 250 hPa which l would say suggests a northward track from where lrma presently is.
Note also how the clouds pick up speed(hence the wind) to the east of the eye of this hurricane. Which l believe will have the effect of pushing the nose of this hurricane downwards, So forcing this hurricane to move westwards rather then northwards. That’s my ideas anyway, only time will tell if am right or not.
Sorry l mean to the west of the eye not the east.
My thoughts exactly, but there is possibly more to it than just the 250Hpa wind flow. As Irma moves north, the flow has more of a chance to “grab” it and swing it north, and Null School has a large portion of the wind under Irma in a few hours time. As the “tug of war” evens out, there is possibly another force (coriolis) that nudges Irma north. What I would find interesting is to hear a point by point explanation about Irmas movements as it seemingly and repeatedly bounced off the coast of Cuba. Really the NHC does an excellent job, for us armchair quarterbacks, kind of easy when we can see what happens 3 hrs after the fact. Fascinating stuff though, Hope all remain safe and heed the warnings.
I appreciate the arm-chair quarterbacking of this thread. It is fun to speculate. I don’t know much about hurricanes, but I do know something about reading trends. I see two trends here:
1. The westward trend. Every time they have revised the storm track of Iris, they have redrawn the new track to the west of the last track. A few days ago, it was going to go up the Atlantic coast of Florida. Then it was going to go right up through the center of Florida. Now it’s going to go up the Gulf coast of Florida. So I’m guessing that the next time they redraw the track it will be drawn west of the Gulf coast of Florida.
2. The deceleration. Over the last two days there has been a steady 5 MPH per day deceleration in the speed that the eye of Irma is moving. Now (10pm Eastern Time) it is crawling along at just 6 MPH. If the linear deceleration continues it will stop in its tracks sometime tomorrow night. There was a precedent: Hurricane Mitch stopped in its tracks in 1998 before skittering off to the east-north-east.
There is a drag effect when the eye wall is partially over land as Irma was over Cuba for most of the day.
The cyclonic vortex is of course a fluid and not a rigid or semi-rigid tire. But the land under the eye wall imparts an orographic lift to the horizontally directed surface boundary flow. This in effect drags on that portion of the vortex. The drg effect would be greater if the land were on the advancing side of the vortex, so this setup it is weaker with the land on the retreating side of the eye wall (relative to forward motion).
My question is do the forecast models model this land-eye wall effect? Or do they simply model using pressure patterns and measured winds and SSTs?
Well, time and the objective evidence seems to suggest that you were not right after all….
Dr. Maue knows a great deal more about hurricanes than I ever will but it doesn’t appear to be strengthening yet. Slowed way down and probably about to make the turn north into water that’s in the U-80’s and away from Cuba, the land mass that helped to weakened it.
It’s possible to get back to much of its previous strength very quickly. Hurricane Charlie did this with extremely warm waters in a similar location back in 2004…..going from 110 mph to 145 mph in just 3 hours……but time is running out.
It’s obvious that over the past few days, the guidance has been too far north and east and has had to be continually adjusted farther south and west. Going from the east coast of FL to even off the East, to now along or even west of the west coast. The intensity has also had to be lowered, especially quite a bit today. Sometimes, observations/now casting can be very useful to improve upon computer models that are clearly having a consistent bias/error in the same direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Charley
https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/southeast_loop.php
Don’t know what’s happened to him….but he has certainly turned into a drama queen
Irma seems to be headed to Nashville.
Hours after NBC announced that Irma was “locked and loaded” for Mar-A-Lago, Irma has decided to become a Gulf storm instead.
Left social media has been in twitter nirvana with the thoughts of Mar-A-Lago getting trashed. But like November 8 2016, they will need to go cry in their wine.
And the Left needs to understand that hurricanes and weather don’t care about climate change or who supports the alarmism. Point them to the thrashing Sir Richard Branson’s luxury island took.
Unlesss every one of those Left-leaning, twittering twits loses their job, Ken Storey has a heck of a lawsuit on his hands.
Just a stray thought: How are the Tesla-owning people in southern Florida doing with their evacuation efforts? Bet it’s wonderful to try to find a charging station every 200 miles or so (maybe fewer miles, considering how slow the traffic is moving), wait your turn, then sit for, what, four to six hours (?) to charge the batteries.
I can easily carry four, five-gallon cans of gasoline in my car, along with my more valuable possessions, and drive for over a thousand miles, if I start with a full tank. With two people taking turns driving, that could be done in less than a day. What’s the best a Tesla-owner can do?
I doubt there is a large percentage of households with only a Tesla. They are likely to be the second or third car in a household.
Anyone with a vehicle that expensive probably drove it out of state last week.
It’s not just EV owners that have a problem y’know. Hydrocarbon fueled vehicles are going to get lousy mileage crawling along in traffic at maybe 20kph (12mph) in a tropical climate with the A/C running. So every few hundred miles, you have to find an open gas station that has gas. And possibly wait for hours to get to a pump that can service maybe 15-20 vehicles per hour (at most).
I’m kind of dubious about evacuation as the survival strategy. If we give each vehicle 10m of lane (need a bit of separation) and assume 20kph, and assume an average of two people per vehicle (probably about right for a rather elderly population), we find that we can evacuate about 2000 vehicles per outbound lane per hour = 4000 folks per hour.
How many outbound lanes? For the Florida Keys, it’s two max. One if you want to get supplies like bottled water and gasoline to Key West. Maybe one can evacuate the Keys in a day or so. But that just dumps the folks from the Keys into Miami-Dade where they can join the folks trying to leave an area with a population of almost 3 million. How many lanes out of Miami-Dade excluding US1 South to the Keys? Pragmatically – maybe 10. — That’s 40,000 people per hour. And that assumes no breakdowns or accidents or vehicles that run out of gas. And many of those 10 lanes run through areas where people are also evacuating.
Not a great situation I think.
My wife’s Mercedes GLA 250 mini-SUV shuts down in stopped traffic–re-starts itself when you remove your foot off the brake. I find it uneasy give the fact that my 55 Ford would do the same until I finally figured out the idle setting. I suggest that it is a real great advantage when other vehicles are idling their fuel away in long traffic lines trying to get out of Dodge or Ford (sarc).
http://tropicalatlantic.com/recon/recon.cgi?basin=al&year=2017&storm=Irma&product=hdob
take a look at the hurricane hunters flight data. click on the icon for google earth if you want to see what they see.
If this hurricane manages to thread the Straits and miss Florida altogether (an event which now cannot be entirely ruled out), then not only are the forecasters going to look ridiculous, but their warnings are going to be all the less heeded when Irma finally does make a US landfall God knows where. Additionally, the massive scale of the Florida evacuation is going to do significant damage to the state’s economy in terms of lost wages and productivity, hurricane or no hurricane. The social dynamics post-Irma have the potential to turn quite nasty depending on what happens over the next 6-12 hours.
“Irma’s intensity has been conservatively lowered to 105 kt, and I’d rather wait to lower further until we’ve seen the full data set from the Air Force mission.” From NHC at 11 pm.
In reading all the news, even NHC, the amount of “potential” death and doom adjectives is stunning.
I understand the need to be cautious but all the “mights, coulds, etc” are getting weary.
Even those espousing potential flood surges are all of a sudden hedging their claims with a lot of qualifiers.
As I listen to the breathless meteorologists on TV right now, I’m reminded of this.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken
+10
EW3
” Breathless” Is the perfect word.
Living on the East coast I was pretty happy to go from getting run over by a 150 mph eye wall, to projected hurricane gusts. You would never there was any difference by listening to the local TV meteorologists.
https://youtu.be/WfVcvyxLj-s
I don’t agree with that assessment in this case. IMO most of the meteorologists are just excited and enthusiastic and I know the feeling from being a soldier. You train and study and learn the science and art in your field for years and then when the time comes and there is an opportunity to use it you want to do so. You want to prove your mettle and professional competence and test yourself even though you know that the very situation that is allowing you to do so is a terrible human disaster.. I think many of those you are referring to face a similar conundrum.
The Gulf Stream is now the second power source for Irma.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=conus×pan=24hrs&anim=html5
IMHO, The time-lapse seems to show Irma is getting pushed maybe SW?
Jetstream pushes in the northeast.
Just a small point, but most of the cloud cover over the northern half of Florida is from a NorthEaster that came in yesterday, high wind, bands of rain. My sense is that the NorthEaster is stronger than expected and is playing a role in shifting Irma west.
Maybe not a small point?
Photo of tree with bark stripped in San Martin, see with photo in http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/9/7/162643.
It is the with photo in the series and shows bark stripped off a tree at fit off the ground. It is the photo of a grey SUV in the foreground with the tree in front of it bent double. Shot taken by Gerben van Es
This is reputed to require 200 mph according to the wiki on the 1780 hurricane & many other sources
Is it time to revise either the speed of IRMA or the 200 mph figure for bark stripping?
Is this is the picture you are referring to?/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9200341/AP_17250821437251.jpg)
Yes
Definitely not 200 mph. Flying rubbish instead.
Could have been an embedded tornado.
200 mph winds? Yeah right. Those houses would be leveled.
Sorry eight foot off the ground for the stripped bark, photoalso available fron ABC7 Chicago, but takes ages to load
Bark gets stripped off trees by flying sheets of roofing iron. They’re everywhere in a strong hurricane and they are a major cause of death. A good hit from one of those can be enough to completely break a tree trunk.
I don’t think so – it got zapped by landfall in Cuba. (I hope)…
I would like to see the actual data for MPH at landfall in the keys and up the west coast of FL…Hope it’s not as bad as predicted…I hope that the Key West to FL highway doesn’t break…
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=kywf1
Irma is the logical result of nature. When sea surface temperatures rise to 31.7°C (89.1°F) in Key West (Florida), as an example, then the conditions for strong hurricanes are created. The heat of the water is energy for hurricanes.
What has to be done is prevent that such situations can ever happen.
1. Know the facts. Sea surface temperatures are more significant than temperatures above land and have to be available at every time..
2. By all means one has to prevent sea surface temperatures reaching that high. The inhabitants of the coastal areas have to take profit of this huge energy, not hurricanes! Example: a sea water heating installation extracts heat from the sea water and uses it to heat houses. The cooled water flows back to the sea. More information: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/clues/files/hague
3. By all means, the sea surface temperature in the environment of civilization has to remain below a certain level. Why not move an iceberg to a region in case of urgency?
So, a whole (new?) discipline has to be elaborated. If people want to avoid yearly catastrophies regarding economic and social welfare, such studies are very urgently needed and have to be implemented immediately.
Rik, how much would it cost me to have you cool the seas???
1. Know the facts.:
Folks in Florida don’t need to heat their homes in August and September ! An iceberg is a drop in the ocean [sic].
“By all means one has to prevent sea surface temperatures reaching that high. ”
That “new” discipline is called geo-engineering and will a catastrophic sorcerers apprentice job since we have very little true understanding of how climate works. Untill you understand something ( REALLY understand ) you can not fix or adjust it.
Look at how much temps drop after Irma passes and you will get an idea of the scale of what you would need to do to achieve the same result.
I know, if you could take air from high pressure systems and inject it into cyclonic depressions we could stop hurricanes forming !! 😉