Felix update

Here is my first Pajamas Media post on Hurricane Felix. I submitted it at just after 1:30 AM, but it didn't appear online until after 5:00 AM; I'm assured this was an unusual circumstance, and updates will normally appear much more quickly, even in the middle of the night. In any event, I'm allowed to post an excerpt here, so here goes:

Hurricane Felix has undergone a remarkable period of rapid intensification over the last two days, strengthening from a tropical depression with 35 mph winds at 2:00 AM Saturday into a Category Five hurricane with 165 mph winds at 8:00 PM Sunday -- the Caribbean's second Cat. 5 in two weeks. Further strengthening is possible as Felix barrels westward through the southern Caribbean, menacing Central America and perhaps eventually Mexico, but probably not the United States.

The storm's minimum central pressure dropped 73 millibars in those 42 hours, from 1007 mb to 934 mb. The Atlantic has seen speedier bursts of intensification in recent years -- Hurricane Wilma's 8-hour, 69-millibar plunge in 2005 comes to mind -- but still, going from a T.D. to a Cat. 5 in less than 48 hours is quite a feat ...

Where will Felix go? A Hurricane Watch is up for the Honduras coast from the border with Nicaragua east to Limon, and the official forecast track brings the storm very close to the Honduras coast by Tuesday morning. Whether it actually makes landfall in Hondruas, or merely scrapes the coast as Hurricane Dean scraped Jamaica's south shore, is difficult to predict. But even a glancing blow could be devastating.

To read the rest, you'll have to visit Pajamas Media -- where a new update will be posted shortly, at the top of the page, BTW.

UPDATE: The update has posted. Here's an excerpt:

Hurricane Felix weakened ever-so-slightly overnight, its winds down from 165 to 160 mph and its pressure up from 934 to 940 mb as of 11:00 AM EDT. But that’s almost a distinction without a difference: Felix remains, in the National Hurricane Center’s words, a “potentially catastrophic hurricane” menacing Central America ...

The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger discusses Felix's likely impacts on Central America, and examines why it got so strong, so fast. He also states definitively that "the hurricane is no longer a threat to the United States." Meanwwile, fellow weatherblogger Alan Sullivan looks at the targeted regions of Guatemala and Nicaragua, and notes that Felix -- like Dean before it -- may make landfall in a relatively unpopulated area. That would certainly be a blessing, especially as Felix's hurricane-force winds are limited to a very compact area, no more than 30 miles from the center in any direction. Those 160 mph winds have catastrophic potential, but they will only impact a very small portion of the coastline.

Again, click here to read the whole thing.

Comments

[mstone]

With due respect, this is a very small storm and the area of hurricane-force winds should be noted.

[Brendan Loy]

Good point, mstone. I just submitted an update to PJM mentioning that fact.

[Benedict]

Nice job, Brendan, particularly given what must be the extreme disturbance in the Domersphere after yesterday's game (as an aside, I am wondering whether the curtain on the ND hype machine has ever been pulled aside this early in the season before?)

Two points on the storm front:

1. I note the reference in the full text of your PJM piece to Hurricane FiFi, the fourth deadliest Atlantic hurricane of all time, which occurred in 1974, when global cooling, not warming, was the meteorological concern du jour. In reviewing Weather Underground's list of the 30 most deadly Atlantic hurricanes of all time, I note that only Mitch (at #3 in 1998), Jeanne (at #12 in 2004), and Katrina (way down at #30 in 2005) make the list from our era of alleged "anthropogenic global warming". Contrast that with the era from 1775 to 1780, which saw three of the top ten deadliest hurricanes. And while the early warning and communication systems are infinitely advanced from the Revolutionary Era, so are the size of the populations living in path of the great storms. As we are now well into the second hurricane season in a row without a major storm having made landfall on the US, I am wondering whether you would revisit some of your earlier posts / comments on the disparity of the facts from the "narrative" we were led to expect (more, fiercer, costlier, deadlier hurricanes due to AGW).

2. Both Dr. Jeff Masters and Eric Berger, bloggers who you cite approvingly, link to Wikipedia in their articles. This does not inspire confidence, and kudos to you for, as far as I can tell, avoiding such citations.