Wilma Is Now The Most Intense Hurricane Ever Recorded In The Atlantic

[shawmut]

Vortex Data Message

000
URNT12 KNHC 190835
VORTEX DATA MESSAGE
A. 19/08:00:30Z
B. 17 deg 03 min N
082 deg 20 min W
C. 700 mb 2082 m
D. NA kt
E. NA deg nm
F. 320 deg 166 kt
G. 221 deg 003 nm
H. 884 mb
I. 10 C/ 3073 m
J. 24 C/ 3043 m
K. 10 C/ NA
L. CLOSED
M. C4
N. 12345/ 7
O. 0.02 / 1 nm
P. AF308 0724A WILMA OB 16
MAX FL WIND 168 KT SE QUAD 06:10:20 Z

[Kipling]

1. I have a bad feeling about this.

[tavalon]

2. As well you should

Shitfire.

Maybe we can all just deny global warming and make the bad storm go away.

[AirmensMom]

3. Yeah.

How would you like to live in South FL right now?

[SoCalDem]

5. Since the highest winds are immediately surrounding the eye

and if the eye remains super-small, wouldn;t this storm cause less damage (wind) than an "ordinary one"?? If it moves fast and has a small eye, It could just blow in and right out again..yes??

[progressive_realist]

8. This storm will go through an eyewall replacement cycle. . .

before it makes landfall. Right now the stormwatchers are saying it resembles a tornado as much as a hurricane. After the eyewall replacement cycle and after it moves over the slightly cooler waters of the Gulf, who knows?

[readmoreoften]

4. its supposed to be cat 3 by saturday, right?

I hope so. My partner's in Florida on vacation.

[aquart]

7. Time to pack up and come home.

They have a stupid gun law, anyway.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. This is one weird-ass storm

The eye is a scant 2100 meters across.

Eyewall windspeed is in the mid-cat-5 range; a few miles out of the area, it's cat-2 and less.

This is starting to look like a tornado embedded in a hurricane. If the eyewall collapses -- which it probably will -- Wilma will regress to a cat-2 or cat-3 with a 20-40 km eye diameter.

Steve Gregory's blog at Weather Underground is usually a little more sedate than it has been tonight. He's edited himself a few times, too, because some of his rhetoric had been ... excitable.

The cloudtop temperatures are also at the limits of the usual detecting equipment, -87C. Mo' betta' satellite imagers will have to be used to properly measure this storm.

Remember, "global warming" is still controversial because the worldwide temperature anomaly is still a scant 0.6C -- just over a degree Farenheit. It is forecast to increase another two to twelve degrees Farenheit over the next century, depending on which report your read. I have a feeling that these meteorological oddities will become more and more common, and start to appear in the Pacific and Indian Ocean basins of cyclonic development, which usually produce stronger, but more predictable, storms.

My own wild-assed prediction: look for the Arctic basin to produce cyclonic storms -- as early as next season, but certainly sometime in the next decade.

Being a whacked-out layman has its benefits!

--p!

[Birthmark]

10. This is the most extraordinary storm...

...that I've ever seen. A two mile eye?! I wouldn't have believed that that was even possible! Yet there it is - and persisting, too. Where's the eye wall replacement? I have a hunch we're going to learn a lot from this hurricane.

[fleabert]

12. how's this going to be for cancun and the rest of the yucatan, not to

mention, cuba?

[redsoxliberal]

9. I was just about to post that vort message... this is incredible deepening

I have never, NEVER seen anything like this before!

Never mind a hurricane, not even in an extratropical, northern latitude storm. This is unbelievable!

>70 MB deepening in <24 hours... absolutely historic!

wx mike... where are you located, and are you a pro met?

(I'll be going to college next year to become one...)

[Dogmudgeon]

11. Best of luck to you!

Though probably hard work is the better course if you're going into meteorology.

You're certainly going to be in the field in an interesting time in history.

I've just been an amateur (a RANK amateur at that) but this is only the third thing I've ever been this impressed by. Here are the other two:

1. The Duplin County, NC "Tornadocane" of 1999.

On the evening of April 15, 1999, one of the most bizarre and unusual supercell thunderstorms ever observed roared across southeastern North Carolina. It produced several damaging tornadoes, one killer tornado, non-tornadic wind damage reports, and a measured gust to 165 mph. At one point, as it was producing a tornado with a 30 mile damage track across portions of Duplin County, the thunderstorm cluster assumed a hurricane-like shape (above, and in this filtered image), even forming an eye-like "hole" in the reflectivity field just east of the mesocyclone. (The mesocyclone -- parent circulation to the tornadoes -- is evident in this storm-relative velocity image off Morehead City's Doppler radar.)

The storm moved out of northern South Carolina as a heavy-precipitation (HP) supercell, moving east-northeast close to the intersection of a warm front and a surface trough. It then moved ENE across southern NC, producing a gust front on its rear flank on which more thunderstorm cells formed. That gust-frontal band, and the forward flank of the original storm, began to curve into spiral bands -- eventually assuming the hurricane shape. This structure was the result. The evolution of this storm from HP supercell to "tornadocane" to bow echo is shown and described in more detail here.

The 165 mph gust was recorded just north of Trenton NC in Jones County, at about 0220Z (10:20 pm EDT). At the time, the original HP storm and the cells along its gust front had largely separated; and the gust corresponded well to the track of the gate-to-gate shear maximum in the mesocyclone. So this gust may have resulted from a tornado strike to the anemometer, or an intense eddy in the downburst. There was also a more typical signature of an HP supercell well offshore over the Atlantic E of Myrtle Beach SC (not shown).

2. The Superstorm of 1993.

There's a ton of on-line information on it, but very few of them mention the rare, world-spanning "Wave 2" phenomenon. See it at http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lbf/pastevents/1949/1993/upper/... -- the previous Wave 2 storm was, I think, from 1949.

Simultaneous ridging over Western Europe...Asia and the Pacific forms the Wave-2 extending from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Mexico.

That's some ridge -- the web page lets you do a pseudo-animation you can control by running your mouse over the links at the left. It's a mind-blower, even if your level of expertise is as low as mine is.

Yep ... it's quite a time to be a meteorologist.

--p!

[redsoxliberal]

15. that tornadocane is really something... superstorm was the mother of all

triple phasers.

I was still living in England at the time... and I think Boston only got 10" or so anyway... but what a beastly storm... Incredibly low pressures for a blizzard... and a freaking triple phaser!

[Scurrilous]

13. Wilma's in the Atlantic? n/t

[redsoxliberal]

14. atlantic basin... really the carribean or gomex

[MercutioATC]

16. There are no "Carribean" hurricanes, just "Atlantic" and "Pacific".

Given the choices, yes, Wilma is an Atlantic hurricane.

[tkmorris]

18. The Atlantic Basin

Basically you can think of two main areas for hurricanes in the northern hemisphere. The Atlantic basin and the Pacific basin. They include not only the oceans but the various seas and gulfs connected to them. The Pacific is known for producing the somewhat bigger storms, including the incredible Typhoon Tip. Google that if you have any interest in these storms at all, it was amazing. At it's peak it would have covered over half of the continental United States.

If this pressure reading stands up after checking the electronics Wilma will have the lowest pressure of any storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Lower than Camille, lower than Andrew. Lower than Mitch or Gilbert, or even Katrina at her peak. 24 hours ago it was a stretch to call it a hurricane; now it's the most awesome storm ever observed in this hemisphere. This kind of strengthening is unprecedented. I have been a tropics watcher for some years now, including a student of historical storms, and I have never seen anything like this. Ever. Until today I would have thought it impossible. I wish I believed that this season was an abberation but it would seem that whatever changes in global climatology have brought about these conditions are likely to persist for some years to come. I believe the tropics, especially the Carribean and Gulf of Mexico, have reached a tipping point. The average water temperatures have become too high, the expected upper level wind shear too low. I hope this is a temporary condition but I just don't know.

If next season is anything like this one you will see a mass exodus from Florida and the Gulf coasts. Sucks for me, I own a house here.

[Scurrilous]

21. Thanks for the info...

...it's going to be a interesting weekend here in South Florida.

[leveymg]

17. Any chance this thing is going to remain a Cat 3-5 after crossing FL?

Looks like it could wreck the lower half of the Eastern Seaboard if it reorganizes itself after crossing the Florida Penninsula - is that possible?

[tkmorris]

19. Not likely

Fortunately Wilma will probably weaken a good bit before making landfall at all. Normally hitting land would rapidly decrease a hurricanes strength even further but Wilma will probably be moving so fast that the Florida peninsula passage, if it occurs, won't weaken her too much. I'm thinking about about landfall as a cat3 storm and maybe exiting as a borderline cat2. After that though she would appear to be headed towards London at breakneck speed. She will probably die in the northern Atlantic without affecting anyone else on the east coast.

Mind you, everything I know about these storms is picked from the brains of people more knowledgable than I about them.

[redsoxliberal]

23. a worst case scenario would be a 1938 cane redux wrt strength

it is highly unlikely that it would cause the same damage however.

We'll see... it's too soon to say whether Wilma phases with the trough early enough... if she does, NYC-North will be slammed.

[RockaFowler]

20. My Dad lives on Marco Island

When I was growing up there, we used to hear stories that if a CAT 3 or higher hit the island directly that would be it. My Dad had a lot of damage from Andrew back in 1992 and that wasn't even a direct hit. The island is hanging out there all by itself.

The only problem that I really see is that my Dad can't even come over here to Palm Beach because this stupid witch will come straight across the state. I hate this time of year. I guess we'll all go see my Mom up in the Panhandle or my sister in Atlanta. We would probably be safer . . .

[theHandpuppet]

22. Gee, those folks who claimed this was a "normal hurricane season"...

... and told me to "get back to them in December" re: global warming -- do you want to come out and play now? Or should I still "wait until December" to discuss whether or not this is a harbinger of things to come?