Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi
Position: 14.1S 156.5E [ 9 PM CST 0300 UTC 1PM AEST].
Movement: West-Southwest [255°] near 25 mph [40 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 115 mph [185 kph].
Wind Gusts: 145 mph [230 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 185 miles [295 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 40 miles [ 65 km].
Minimum central pressure: 955 mb ↓.
Currently about 740 miles [1185 km] East-Northeast of Cairns, Australia in the Coral Sea.
A Cyclone Warning is in effect for coastal areas from Cooktown to Sarina.
A Cyclone Watch is in effect for coastal and island communities North and South of the Warning area from Lockhart River to Yeppoon and adjacent inland areas in Queensland.
This classified as a Category 3 Severe Tropical Cyclone, and if the forecasts are correct it will be a Category 4 or 5 by the time it makes landfall. The storm is spinning up over very warm water and is expanding, so it will affect a wide area, not just the center of the track.
The tracking is edging southward slightly from the last forecast and the eye is tightening.
Check the Australian BoM Cyclone page for the most current information.
6 comments
Good grief… the Aussies just can’t catch a break! Bryan, if I recall correctly, you went through a hurricane season like that a few years back, one storm after another, some of them devastating, no time to recover between storms.
We have one advantage that they don’t – sand. We don’t get the flooding, beyond the storm surge, that they experience because they have real dirt under their feet and mountains beyond the coast. If US hurricanes started hitting the East Coast north of mid-Georgia, you would see the same problems that Queensland is experiencing. The other difference is that we were getting multiple hits during dry years, so even where there was dirt, it had a lot of capacity to soak up the water.
The Navy is saying Yasi will be a maximum category 4 hurricane and then fade a little before coming ashore. We can hope for an eyewall replacement to take some of the starch out of the storm, but there is nothing else on the map that will affect it.
Heard from Kyrten42 lately?
Kryten is moving and has to wait for Internet service. He lives in Victoria, which is the state on the east side of the South Coast of Australia, so he gets the wildfires, not cyclones.
I had seen some of his comments about being in the moving process, but hadn’t seen him in a few days and wanted to ask about him.
He’s probably having a fit because he is cut off from the Egypt news and the cyclone news until he gets reconnected.