Major Hurricane Ike – Category 3
Position: 21.2 N 76.6 W. [1 AM CDT]
Movement: West [270°] near 13 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 120 mph.
Wind Gusts: 150 mph.
Hurricane Wind Radius: 60 miles.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 140 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 945 mb.
It is just inland on the North coast of Cuba in the province of Las Tunas about 85 miles East of Camaguey.
The sustained winds are down, but so is the pressure which is counter-intuitive. The aircraft have found an outer eyewall which indicates the storm is going through an eyewall replacement cycle. This explains the situation. The inner eyewall is collapsing and it will be replaced by the outer, but that weakens the storm for a while. This is good news because it is about to strike Cuba and if it begins its transit over Cuba as a weaker storm, it will be much harder for it to rebuild after it enters the Gulf. No guarantees, but things look better than they did at 1PM.
8 comments
poor louisiana. looks like 2008 could be their erin/opal year.
I think Katrina/Rita punched that ticket rather convincingly. Speaking of Rita the current models are more on that track.
true, except that katrina and rita made landfall sort of at opposite edges of the state. as you say, it’s all useless speculation at this point.
i was just looking at the historical map at wunderground; can’t tell from the map about the unnamed storms in early years, but i noticed the named storms for september of more recent years are early in the alphabet: donna, david, frances…
Close counts in hurricanes, especially if they go in West of you.
The average number of named storms per year is only 10, so the early alphabet gets a work out.
my point about the early alphabet is that in septembers of other years we only made it up to 4 or 5 or 6 storms big enough to be named, but now we’re getting to nine+ letters into the alphabet by september [ivan, katrina, ike]
Oh, yeah, well the season is starting earlier and lasting longer. Look at the dates on the years that we got hit by 5 named storms in a row – they do seem to cluster, as if a tipping point was reached.
yep, i remember kate… letter k… in november. and yeah the 5-in-a-row, scary.
Unless Ike hangs a U-turn it will be 6-in-a-row this year.