HumidCity

From Jeff Masters Blog on Weather Underground:

Tropical Storm Fay (AKA “The Joker”) is pulling a trick that may be unprecedented–significantly intensifying over land, developing a full eyewall. The radar and satellite images of Fay this afternoon (Figures 1 and 2) show a much better-organized storm than the Fay that made landfall this morning. Fay now has a symmetric appearance with a full eyewall, and the winds near the center were sustained at 60 mph this afternoon at Lake Okeechobee. These winds are higher than anything measured at landfall this morning. Remarkably, the pressure has fallen over 10 mb since landfall, and I can’t ever recall seeing such a large pressure fall while a storm was over land. Hurricane Andrew of 1992 crossed South Florida and did not weaken significantly, but “The Joker” has significantly intensified. It does happen sometimes that the increased friction over land can briefly act to intensify a hurricane vortex, but this effect is short-lived, once the storm is cut off from its oceanic moisture source. To have a storm intensify over land and maintain that increased intensity while over land for 12 hours is hard to explain. The only thing I can think is that recent rains in Florida have formed large areas of standing water that the storm is feeding off of. Fay is also probably pulling moisture from Lake Okeechobee. Anyone want to write a Ph.D. thesis on this case? Wow.

Somehow facing a storm called “The Joker” is not something I want to do after seeing Health Ledger’s stellar final performance. Holy Hurricanes Splatman, this one’s off its rocker!

-Loki, HumidCity Founder

Joy. Rapture. Here is what Jeff Masters on Weather Underground has to say about Tropical Storm Fay:

South Carolina? New Orleans? Where will Fay go next?
The computer models continue to show an unusual amount of disagreement about the longer term path of Fay. The official NHC forecast follows the GFDL and HWRF models, which takes Fay northwards through the Florida Peninsula. However, the latest runs of these models now predict Fay will emerge off the east coast of Florida, restrengthen a bit to a 60-70 mph tropical storm, then make landfall Wednesday along the Georgia/South Carolina coast. This solution assumes that the trough of low pressure turning Fay northward will be strong and enough and be moving slow enough to pull Fay all the way northwards into the U.S.

A weaker trough is predicted by the rest of the models, which foresee that Fay will stall over central Florida or the adjacent Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday. A ridge of high pressure will then build in, forcing Fay westward across the northern Gulf of Mexico. A second landfall in the Florida Panhandle or in Louisiana near New Orleans is then a possibility. Since more and more of the models are trending this way, I believe this solution has an equal chance of being correct. “The Joker” may be around to trouble us for another full week or longer.

This is only a smattering of the coverage, including more of Masters’ commentary located here. [Hat tip to SophMom]

Damn.

-Loki, HumidCity Founder

And so it begins. I am still too beaten up by the family tragedy of this weekend to really comment at length, but then again I do not need to for my local audience. The first adrenaline spike of the season has arrived, and like everyone else here I cannot escape the backbeat of fear and unease that accompanies it. Wish us luck. (regular programming will resume Tuesday evening)

Tropical Storm Alberto heads for Florida–NHC | Reuters.com

Tropical Storm Alberto, the 2006 hurricane season’s first named storm, was located in the eastern Gulf of Mexico as of early Monday, slowly making its way toward the central or northern Florida coast, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

Alberto, located about 240 miles south-southwest of Apalachicola, Florida, was still moving north-northeast at about 8 miles per hour with maximum sustained winds of about 50 mph.

A turn to the northeast and some additional strengthening was expected over the next 24 hours.