Christine Hudnall

Our chance of showers and t-storms today came from this weak trough of low pressure out in the GoM. This trough has been giving us gray skies all weekend and it looks like it will continue to do so for at least another day or so. There have been some decent storms associated with it down south and over near the coast, so far, we have seen little of them, but with any luck, storms will come our way. Don’t forget to click on the satellite image to see a larger picture.

Per the 8:00PM Tropical Weather Outlook:

CLOUDINESS AND SHOWERS IN THE EASTERN GULF OF MEXICO ARE ASSOCIATED WITH A WEAK SURFACE TROUGH OF LOW PRESSURE. THIS ACTIVITY IS EXPECTED TO SPREAD EASTWARD OVER FLORIDA AND INTO THE WESTERN ATLANTIC OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS…BUT TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED HERE OR ELSEWHERE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.

And don’t forget StS Laura is still out in the northern part of the Atlantic doing her thing. According to the 5:00PM update, she still had not started that curve to the northeast. Looking at the latest satellite loop, while she isn’t heading northeast yet, it does look to me like she is no longer moving N-NW, maybe NW, or N, after taking a couple of wobbles. We shall continue to watch what she does.

Since I don’t have any of my own images to share right now (promise, I will start taking some again!), I thought I would give a couple of shout outs to images that have caught my eye recently.

So, let’s get started on this journey…

Let’s start with StormChasing Mikey, otherwise known as SCM, while he missed the Nor’easter in his home state of Virginia, what he did get was a rather beautiful sunset shot near the Huntington Beach pier in California.

Now, head north to Canada, home of George Kourounis, go ahead and browse his site, pretty much anything you look at will grab your attention. He travels all over the world documenting severe weather, climate changes and natural disasters.

Head back south to Florida and visit Mike Theiss, first visit http://www.mthurricane.com/ and then head over to his new site, http://www.extremenature.com/. I hope that you will be as inspired as I am.

There are a lot more places to go, but with those three, I think it will take you a little while, so that’s it for now.

Update: 11:45PM - I knew if I waited long enough goofing around the update would come out.

11:00PM - Subtropical Storm Laura - winds still at 60mph, located at 39N 48.4W and is now heading N at 9mph. :)

Updated: 12:06AM - 093008 - added image by James Reynolds of TyphoonFury below.

The tropics and Atlantic have been busy, as well as the Pacific - so get ready for a long post!

Let’s start in the West Pacific where they have been getting hit hard by storm after storm. The latest to hit was Super Typhoon Jangmi, which is now listed as a Severe Tropical Storm. There is also Tropical Storm Mekkhala and Tropical Depression Twenty-one out there too.

Just yesterday (can that really be?) Tropical Storm Jangmi was Super Typhoon Jangmi, that by Atlantic Basin standards had gotten up to Category 4, with 155 mph winds. (Do typhoons get rated the same as hurricanes - hmmm, something to look up and learn!) It crossed over Taiwan, north of Hualien. It is now back over water, and according to the history on Wunderground, after it became a tropical storm, it actually hit category 1 again, before going back to tropical storm. Scroll down and look at the coordinates. Nothing is showing that it will return to a typhoon again, but I do wonder, since it is headed back toward warmer waters. Click on the satellite image to get larger image.

Then there is Tropical Storm Mekkhala - forecast is not showing that Mekkhala will become a typhoon before landfall, latest information is showing winds at 45mph. With the high sst’s, it might just pick up a little more, we shall keep watching.

Also worth watching is newly formed Tropical Depression Twenty-one (TD 21) - located at 8.7N 131.6E, winds at 30mph.

The following section has been updated.

Want to know and see more about our hurricane cousins, typhoons, then head over to TyphoonFury, website of James Reynolds. With luck, I will update this post later with small image that James took of surge coming into Hualein harbor. Absolutely amazing! Just am waiting to hear back if I have permission or not. Keep your fingers crossed. Received reply back from James, he is such a sweetie!

Hi Christine.

Thanks for the email. Please feel free to download that pic and any other and put it on your website and thanks for offering to link the image too! I love your website, it great to see typhoons being featured.

Take care and if there’s anything else I can help you with please let me know.

Cheers,

James.

Isn’t that the nicest! First, thanks for looking, and second thanks for saying yes! :) Will only use the one image for now, but people should absolutely go and look at the video - amazing! YouTube video by James of Super Typhoon Jangmi. All copyrights and usage terms belong to James for his image, all his rights are reserved. I asked and received permission to use, you need to do the same.

Onto the Atlantic:

I haven’t posted anything but honestly we did have a Hurricane Kyle out there, he is now post-tropical according to Environment Canada, which is where he is right now. From looking at satellite image, if he had a center, it would be located over Anticosti Island in Southern Quebec. Kyle had just weakened to a tropical storm as he made landfall last night at 9:30PM, just north of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

Sub-tropical Storm Laura is located, as of 5:00AM, at 37.2N 47.3W, winds at 60mph. From satellite images, she looks to be heading WNW, but is forecast to start her turn toward the north east. It will be interesting to see if she will be upgraded sometime today, even as she is heading toward cooler waters.

Here on the homefront we are listed at 70% of showers likely for today with 40% 50% (I just love when they change it while typing) chance for thunderstorms tonight. Would it be wrong to say, please, please, please - I need more lightning shots! :-D

Okay, now for some kudos to go out. Dewdrop has been giving out awards on her site to others, myself included in the receiving. Well, I figured it was my turn to give out some, even if noone reads my blog, but for the Dew. I stand corrected, not only does the Dew read it, but the Milkman does too! ;-)*laughs* That’s okay, I read other sites and I have listed 5 that have helped me or inspired me. That’s not to say that many others don’t, I just had to narrow it down and 5 was a nice number. :D

I won’t repeat the list here, but will send you to the newly formed Kudos page, located in the top links of the blog. Don’t want to scroll all the way back up, that is okay, I wouldn’t either, so here you go, a handy-dandy quick link to the Kudos page.

Buongiorno!

I have been working on a new look for the site, a little different than what I am used to, but I like it, and hope that you will too.

I’ve only been able to test in a few browsers, so if you see a problem, please let me know, I will try to correct it.

No, you aren’t imagining it when you see some Italian mixed in with the English, originally it was an Italian theme. Some things I’ve kept that way, just to mix it up a bit. Compared to all the other themes I’ve tried, I’ve made very minor modifications. All others were heavily modified so that original theme was pretty much nowhere to be found. So, that speaks much about how I like this one.

It is still a work in progress, until all kinks are out, but I ‘think’ I’ve gotten majority of it done.

Yes, I know it’s girl-y-ish, look beyond that. It is easy to use, easy on the eyes, etc.? I hope so - so, what do you think?

Ciao e grazie Laura!

Was talking with one of my sisters, who still lives down in Homestead, and it got me to thinking. We’ve talked at least once a day (or every other day) since the start of Hurricane Ike, back when he first formed into depression on September 1st. (Can it really only be 5 days ago?!) We both said, he needs watching. Later that day he was Tropical Storm Ike and we watched as he gathered strength and two days later he was renamed Hurricane Ike.

Well, Ike continues to gather strength and is a major hurricane. Sure he has lost some strength as he went along, and then regained it adding more, which is all a normal part of the eyewall replacement cycle, which is a naturally occuring phenom in intense cyclones, that was discovered during the U.S. Government’s hurricane modification experiment called Project STORMFURY.

I was going to discuss a little bit about Project STORMFURY and the effects of seeding hurricanes and clouds, but have decided not to and just close with, we can try an mess with Mother Nature, but it will bite us in the butt in the long run. Leave nature alone, we’ve messed with it enough over the years.

To get back to topic, my family are Hurricane Andrew survivors, yes, we’ve been through other hurricanes, some major ones, but they always get compared to Andrew. And so far (thankfully) none have surpassed him. So, we take watching the tropics seriously and getting as prepared as we can, seriously.

Now, when Andrew came through, my youngest nephew was just a couple of months over two years old. And he has been through some since then too, but with Ike, my sister was telling me, he is getting concerned. The others it was, yeah get prepared, but we’ll be okay. Not this one.

So, what is so different about Ike that has people, in the words of my now teenaged nephew “going friggin crazy”?

Could it be that the shear compact strength of him and not to mention the looks are very reminescent of Andrew? Are people having déjà vu? I know for me personally, sure, I watch hurricanes come and go on radar, satellite and in my different weather programs, and like to go out and feel the power of them, but with Ike, I have been watching closer. So, am I under the same influence as others are? Is that why my heart beats just a little harder whenever I look at Ike?

Hurricane Andrew was basically a bomb that exploded over our area. NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) states it best in their FAQ’s page on Hurricanes, Typhoons and Tropical Cyclones, and someone asked “Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by ___ (fill in the blank)“.

For example, when Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the eye and eyewall devastated a swath 20 miles wide. The heat energy released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant over which the eye passed. The kinetic energy of the wind at any instant was equivalent to that released by a nuclear warhead.

Thank you AOML - those of us that lived through it have been saying it all along.

Be prepared, keep watch, be safe, but don’t “go friggin crazy”. Remember what happened, but don’t let it rule you, there is still a whole lot of changing in a cyclone that can happen, namely, direction.

Newest coords:

REPEATING THE 1100 PM AST POSITION…21.2 N…70.9 W. MOVEMENT
TOWARD…WEST-SOUTHWEST NEAR 15 MPH. MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS…135
MPH. MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE…947 MB.

Re-analysis Project - The upgrading of Hurricane Andrew

Whew! Have been so busy haven’t had time to update, let alone really talk to anyone, so thought I would share some useful, if not just pretty neat, Google Earth stuff that I’ve located that pertains to weather. I’ve also included the FEMA GE flood stuff that I found because living in Florida, this is a need to know thing! :-)

They are listed in no particular order, I will add on to them as I find them. Also, some of these are to the respective pages that I found the information on - so that credit goes where it should - for those files that are the actual .kmz or .kml, it was only because either I don’t remember where I found them or they were given to me from someone else. After a couple of days this post will go up into the ‘Latest News’ section - for easy finding.

• http://tropicalatlantic.com - Info about Atlantic Hurricanes: Hurricane Recon (super cool), Tropical Overlays (plots, models, etc.)
• http://www.msc.fema.gov/ - FEMA - National Flood Hazard Layer - look for Google Earth link on right side list. If you think you are in flood area, you can check it here.
• Sunlight , Cloud Cover, Temperatures & Low Level Winds.kmz - I think I got this from Google Earth Community. Go on, it’s a good place to look, they have some great stuff.