The 2006 hurricane season ended on 30th November with the number of hurricanes that qualified as “major” – category 3 or above – 50 percent below NOAA forecasts and not a single hurricane made landfall.
Hurricane Dean is the first for this 2007 season and according to Jeff Master’s Wunder blog:
“Hurricane Dean has intensified into the first Category 5 storm in the Atlantic since Hurricane Wilma of 2005. The latest Hurricane Hunter fix at 8:34pm EDT found 185 mph winds at their flight level of 10,000 feet, which corresponds to surface winds of 160 mph. The pressure had dropped to 914 mb, and I expect Dean will strengthen right up until landfall. Landfall is expected near Chetumal, Mexico, just after midnight local time…
Keep reading here: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jennifer – you’re teasing again.
You know full well that somehow this can be explained as exactly what the GCM’s or Hansen or Flannery or the Caterpillar CEO predicted and is therefore further evidence that the debate is OVER!
Like Antartica , the Pacific , Greenland ,sea levels etc the hurricanes just haven’t got the message yet!
You should really stop riling the boys up ma’am!
Jim – this hurricane is absolute proof of global warming. Look it’s first of the season. It’s category 5. We told you all but you won’t listen. CO2 sinners – repent before it’s too late. The end is nigh !
LOL – Maybe they should re-name the hurricane after it reforms following it’s Yucatan crossing. Bump up the numbers a bit given this season’s about half over…
According to Jeff Master’s post here Arnost:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=730&tstamp=200707
the atlantic hurricane season is just hotting up, and will peak generally around september 10, with the lions share of hurricanes between aug 20 and oct 20.
so ‘about half over’ is not especially accurate.
This is a loop of Dean crossing the coast. It’s a monster allright, and I sincerely hope that all those in the path will remain safe and well.
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/flt/t1/loop-avn.html
Mea Culpa Lukey Boy.
What’s my pennance?
Reading the entire 4AR !
Dean is the first landfalling Category 5 hurricane in the Western Hemisphere since Hurricane Andrew of 1992.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dean_(2007)
Steve… I know I know. I was being a bit facetious WRT to the three named storms before Dean.
Andrea was a sub-tropical storm so she should not have been named, she lacked key features of a tropical system. And the reanalysis confirmed this. She did not have a warm center, she did not have outflow, she was situated over water that was too cool for tropical development, she was wrapped in dry air, and so forth. Peak intensity 35 knots. But she was named and so brought to end the longest period on record globally without a tropical cyclone. The record would have been extended for another 10 days or so until Gonu. That would not have been a good record in a world that’s supposed to be dominated by greater cyclone/hurricane activity.
Barry was a hybrid (tropical / sub tropical) storm that fitted the tropical storm criteria for less than 12 hours – there was serious windshear and it had a very badly defined eye and max wind speed was less than 50 knots i.e. less than what Moreton Island / Coolangatta / Cape Byron got an hour or two ago when I last looked.
Chantal was a joke WRT to it being tropical… It was a tropical depression that moved north and became “organised” for less than 12 hours when it was near NOVA SCOTIA. Peak intensity was 43 knots.
All I’m doing is putting this into perspective… It is only by a lot of hook and crook that Dean in mid August is not the first real storm of a season that starts in May.
On the subject of storms, there’s a pretty good storm developing in SEQ. This looks like potentially a very big event.
As I write this – since 9am today to 10pm there’s already been some 100mm plus falls in the Hinze dam catchment, and some 20-30mm falls in Wivenhoe and North Pine. Mt Glorious has 49mm so far.
As the system moves NORTH, it should bring in even heavier falls (as they usually come from the southern quandrant of these systems). Here’s a loop showing the low just NE of Moreton Island.
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/sohemi/sohemiloops/shirgmscol.html
GFS is going for accumulated falls of up to 300mm over the next week in the area.
http://forecasts.bsch.au.com/apf.html?region=brisbane&days=7.5
I hope it comes off! Even though this won’t break the drought, it should provide a couple of % points in the dams and at least saturate the ground allowing more runnoff as the normal wet season develops over the next couple of months.
The bad news is that it’s a bit windy… There are gusts in excess of 130Km/hr reported from Moreton Island and I hear that there are thousands without power.
I hope everyone there remains safe and well.
cheers
Arnost
I seem to recall being advised, with considerable gravitas, by a DNRM boffin (is that an oxymoron) that we would not see any cyclones as far south as Brisbane for at least another 30 years.
Hmmn, but it seems that climate cranks don’t make predictions, they just run scarenarios. So I guess the presence of this one, and the recent five that hit Sydney, do not represent failed predictions, just corrections to the scarenarios.
And as NOAA got their scarenario 50% wrong they seem to be in good company. So that is what it has come to, eh? About the same level of certainty as flipping a coin.
You’re confused as usual – it must have been a manager type or at your Nimbin Gold Collective meeting. Any sensible sciencey person knows that “tropical cyclones”, originating in tropical waters, have historically impacted as far south as Byron Bay. Oh to be at the Pass then. Intense lows, cutoff lows, aka “cyclones”, can occur off anywhere off the NSW coast as we have seen a number of late indeed do just that. CSIRO have modelled these things if you had been paying attention and not reading your envelope.
You may be remembering the CSIRO modelling result that found no statistically significant increase in southerly tropical cyclone trajectory in a globally warmed world. Just more intense systems. Try to get it right !
Hurricane Dean has not re-intensified as predicted. The central core completely collapsed during its passage across the Yucatan penisula, and due to unfavourable wind shear in the upper levels, it is not likely to intensify signifcantly before it reaches land again.
The second landfall should be as a Cat 1 storm (with wind 60 to 80 knots) and dissipation of this system into a depression should then be fairly fast. This does not mean that the danger is over. There will be lots of rain associated – which may mean flooding, landslides and such.
The other Atlantic low pressure area has unfavourable upper-level winds to allow it to develop into a tropical storm. The latest advisory expects a quiet Atlantic and Caribbean…for now.
cheers
Arnost