UPDATED LANDFALL ! 4th Strongest Hurricane Ever to Make Landfall & It did it in Mid October!~ 150 MPH. Knocking on Cat 5 Strength. Major Historic Hurricane Michael Knocking on Category 5 Door. Pressure Dropping Down to 923.Winds. Making Landfall NOW. Strong Cat 4... Basically a Borderline Cat 5
Inland.
Note below.
3rd lowest barometric pressure.
4th strongest wind speed at landfall.
This may be reviewed and updated.
Only after...
Labor Day Hurricane.
Camille.
Andrew.
That's some incredible list.
Close up of a screen shot of the eye of Michael.
That's mean... intense.
Vortexes.
Hurricane Michael making landfall Mexico City Beach.
Making landfall now.
A solid ball of Cat 4 Winds in the eye.
Strong hurricane winds further out.
Snowing Up North.
Landfalling Hurricane Down South
October.
Cat 4 Hurricane.
Almost a Cat 5 Hurricane.
Windwise not
Barometric Pressure Yes.
Up close.
Eye wall touching the coast.
Listening to TWC
Listening to Jim Williams near the eye.
Close. Hope to the eye.
We're friends.
I hope the truck survives.
:)
This is what my left eye is watching...
...as I type.
Phone Radar from Jim.
Crazy video.
There you go...
Officially 919 MB.
This is how fast this is evolving.
923 mb.
Think Hurricane Andrew.
Radar signature shows vortexes in the eye.
That's a deep eye.
Close to land.
Part of the distant bands are now on shore.
Tornadoes blowing up in fast moving bands.
This is borderline Category 5
Pressure dropped.
Presentation perfect.
Can they get a wind reading to support it?
Link to great chaser live... it's off and on but repeats.
The only thing that will stop Hurricane Michael from becoming a Category 5 is the very probable eye wall replacement cycle that usually weakens the storm temporarily. It's not a big difference as the strong Cat 4 winds are in one area and gusts are way over Category 5 wind strength and often the strong, long gusts do more damage as trees and structures already weakened by the steadily increasing hurricane force winds get a few sudden strong gusts and rooftops go sailing into the sky and trees come crashing down. I wouldn't rule out Category FIVE as the pressure is dropping now down to 928 from 937 earlier this morning. But as the eye is evolving and moving towards eye wall replacement cycles than intensity should maintain at 145 MPH though I could see it attaining 150 MPH just before landfall. That's my thought. Discussion from the NHC is shown below. ACTUALLY....they just broke into TWC to say it officially IS 150 MPH. I didn't even have a chance to post this before it was updated, so revising my thought. Yeah....it could become 155 MPH and attain Cat 5 Status. I'd give that even odds 50/50 or maybe even 60/40 to become a Cat 5. No words, even for someone like me who can write or talk forever.
The NHC mentions an outer eyewall may be trying to form.
Key messages in the short term.
In the long term down the road.
Not so far down the road.
This is how you take apart a hurricane.
Going down into each cell...
...vortex...
Note the vortexes shown below.
In the eye.
Blown up it's a bad image but you get the idea.
You have intense cells swirling around inside the eye.
I want you to watch the front.
The loop is above.
See the front at the beginning of the loop?
Last frame it begins to just merge together.
Another view of Michael.
Compare contrast with a few hours earlier below.l
* * *
On radar as Mike says "peaking at the wrong time"
Worst case scenario there.
Note bulletin from NHC below.
Lowest pressure ON RECORD ...
of a landfalling October Hurricane.
If it maintains this intensity..
..or God Forbid strengthens.
Michael knocking on Category Five Door
Bad timing.
Just before landfall.
Note the progression of cones.
All the same.
That's the eye of Hurricane Michael last night.
As it was intensifying into a Cat 4.
I cut it down from a larger image.
We do things like that..
Even if you don't agree with his politics....
... check him out often today.
He will be posting live links all day.
He is a massive weather person...
Really. Not just into the ratings.
Many of us are fascinated by hurricanes.
I often say "I love hurricanes"
People think I'm crazy.
It's not a politically correct thing to say.
Perhaps I SHOULD say..
I'm fascinated by hurricanes.
I'm obsessed with hurricanes.
I know their fury up close and personal.
I've studied them in college.
I've researched them at the NHC Library.
I've written about them.....
...I've lectured about them extensively.
This is a hurricane to remember.
This is happening NOW.
Tons of images and loops there on his site.
I'll post links today as chasers set up ...
..there are a lot of chasers there as well as TWC.
For now I want to talk about Hurricane Michael.
This is why I keep saying stay off I95 tomorrow.
From Bastardi who has been on the money with Michael.
I've said a hurricane would come out of the Carib.
Larry Cosgrove talked on it in June or July.
Joe Bastardi has been screaming into the wind about it.
Cranky knew it was coming.
We all knew it was coming.
https://twitter.com/DaDaBuh showed it early on.
He smells out hurricanes forming. Really.
Track over the models
This is no big surprise.
It's not the Labor Day Hurricane in 1935 that came out of nowhere.
We have seen this coming for days now.
And the cone has been the same for days now.
What more is there to say?
Small deviations in track just prior to landfall are expected.
They always happen.
Hurricane Andrew wobbled just before landfall.
It slammed into Homestead vs Downtown Miami.
But it hit Miami Dade and it hit well within the cone.
How far we have come warning people...
...once upon the time they came with no warning.
This may be a bit of history repeating.
This is the first time we can see history being made.
And we have been watching every step of Michael's formation.
We have been able to warn people to get out.
For those staying... they could prepare.
At least they saw it coming.
"St. Joseph Bay had been known to sailors and seamen, generally, as a deep, safe and secure anchorage in stormy weather, and many trade vessels plying the waters of the Gulf of Mexico had sought its shelter in times of storms."
There is so much to say and so little left to be said; now we can only watch The NHC nailed the track of this hurricane days ago and it has barely budged at all and that's remarkable, because in 1843 when a massive hurricane wiped Port Joseph in Florida off the map there was no warning it was out there before it washed the homes, the people, the dreams and the lives of it's early settlers away. So be glad you live in 2018 when we can track clouds gathering in the Caribbean mixing with remnants of Kirk and study models that show where and when a hurricane is most likely to form. Then we can slice it and dice it studying every cloud burst and pressure drop and dissect it to death before it even has become a hurricane. We can watch long range models that show us pressures will drop in the Caribbean as a High Pressure system anchors itself over the East Coast and the MJO will come in and the EPAC will slow down and one big hurricane is likely to come out of the Caribbean, run up the East Coast East of the Appalachian Mountains in October and flip the switch to winter. And we have time to get people out, to evacuate, to take valuables and to save lives. And, yet.. as we learned from Hurricane Florence people will still die and drive around barricades into a street with a strong current slamming a pick up truck with a mother and her baby into a tree being two more statistics in a climbing death toll.
"The new railroad to Iola, about 30 miles in length, was completed in 1839 and was called the St. Joseph & Iola Railroad. It is thought by some persons to have been a second railroad, but it appears to have been merely an extension from a point on the previously built St. Joseph to Depot Creek railway. Construction to the new line to Iola began in 1838 and was completed in the following year at a cost of $300,000. This was one of the earliest railroads in the United States, – probably the second one. Steel for its construction was shipped from England."
And sometimes people do prepare and hunker down and a massive tree that looked healthy comes crashing down on their home killing them as happened in Florence. A random twister will pop up in a state far from the raging storm and someone like the man in Virginia will die while the hurricane rages distantly in South Carolina. Hurricanes in the old days took no survivors, now days we are more blessed and we are more likely to survive the beast but not everyone survives a Category Four of Category Five Hurricane. And, no this is not a matter of hype it's a matter of reality and when someone calls this a BEAST or a KILLER HURRICANE they know what they are talking about and they are trying to save your life and make you realize how deadly hurricanes still are in 2018. But we can see them coming and we can see every stage of the eye as it grows wider and looks more deadly. When they called it the Angel of Death back then when it wiped out St. Joseph they buried the dead and never looked back.
"This was one of the tropical hurricanes that the north Gulf Coast is occasionally subject to in the Fall of the Year. These happenings, along with the passing of the railroad, plus the many business failures had by 1843 reduced St. Joseph to little more than a fishing village."
First came the Yellow Fever and then the Panic of 1838 and then the storms....... that dealt the final death blow to Old Port Joseph leaving us Port St. Joe under the gun from Category 4 Michael moving towards the town where Stephanie Abrams is waiting to do live remotes not far from another town where Jim Cantore is and where several of my closer friends are chasing Hurricane Michael. I used to chase back when I lived in Florida and usually smaller storms as I was a single mother raising children after a divorce and you have to put the children's lives first and they needed their mother even if she was online with others nonstop tracking every movement of the storm. Unless you have chased a hurricane working with others, watching the wind, recording data, sharing the data and documenting data you really can't imagine what is i like and the roar of the wind and sand in the wind slamming into you is ... wild. Those chasers are way smarter than you realize and they hunker down where it is most safe, well thought out so they can get in, do their job and get out. Trust me is it way scarier to be chased by a Category 5 Hurricane that comes straight at your beautiful home that your incredible family has helped to board up where you hunker down and can do nothing but listen to Bryan Norcross on the battery powered radio when the power went out and listen to the roar of the wind and the sound of the surf from the ocean not so far away. I could hear the surf during Andrew and my friends down in Kendall don't remember that as they huddled in a closet with their baby far inland praying the house would not fall down around them as her husband sat propped against the door trying to keep them safe from the wind. Yeah, that was the house we were going to go to as it was safely inland away from the storm surge... Category 4 and 5 Hurricane Force winds find you far inland away from where freighters are tossed up onto the lawn of bay front mansions in Gables By the Sea.
This is a hurricane you can compare to Hurricane Andrew. It is not a huge hurricane size wise and it's powerful punch is in a small, compact area swirling North towards landfall. And speed wise it is moving fast and will move faster and it will punch through the area fast the way Hurricane Andrew punched through South Florida on what seemed like our longest night but in fact it was short and fast compared to the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane that lumbered slowly through the city. And unlike Hurricane Florence that fell apart before landfall and the steering currents collapsed and it sat and rained itself out... this is not about the flooding rain for days, it is about catastrophic storm surge and winds that will remain hurricane strength deep into Florida and Georgia on it's way to the Carolinas.
Our good records go back to 1851 for Hurricane History but the 1830s and 1840s were dangerous years in the Caribbean and along the Gulf of Mexico, but we have little documentation and as the saying goes dead men tell no tales. The tales from Florence in the Carolinas were not pretty, and Florence was a picnic compared to Hurricane Michael the strongest hurricane of the year in the Atlantic. And you can go back to June and July when I was annoyed that many said this would be a dead hurricane season (dead indeed... many dead now) because of an El Nino forming (it's still forming but far out in the Pacific) and cooler water temperatures in the Mid Atlantic and too much SAL in the basin for anything to form and I kept saying over and over that the hurricane season would be strong later in the season and to Remember September and that the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico would come alive in October with one strong hurricane.
I saw this coming. Many meteorologists saw this coming but it was like screaming into the wind because the headlines went on and on about how quiet 2018 was expected to be especially coming after the 2017 hurricane season. But 2018 will make it's own mark for years to come from the Gulf of Mexico to the Carolinas and the season is NOT over. This may be it's last big storm but until November is over I wouldn't count anything out. And Michael, like Wilma, will flip the switch and cool air will begin to pour into the South and Mid Atlantic and we are that much closer to winter.
http://apalachicolabay.com/rise-fall-old-st-joseph/
http://www.starfl.com/news/20160908/deaths-angel-great-tide-of-1844
The quotes above are from articles linked to above that saw hurricanes come without any warning and left few survivors to tell the tale. There were no storm chasers and there was no Jim Cantore standing there in a Major Historic Hurricane with a whole nation watching live as it happens. My good friend Jim Wiliams of www.hurricanecity.com is there and many good online friends are there doing what they do best. I'm in Raleigh waiting and writing and sharing information online. I'm curious to see what impact Michael could do to the Raleigh Triangle metropolitan area that is preparing for the opening of the NC State Fair on Thursday. I've been to Wrightsville in Tropical Storms which is what they will most likely see from the leftovers of Michael, but I want to see what happens inland as rarely does a back door storm rip through this area. In 1997 on Hurricane Danny's rampage across the SouthEast it caused many problems, but the area was still recovering from Hurricane Fran the year before and few people I spoke to remember but the families who lost loved ones remember. For those who don't remember the NHC began advisories on Danny when it hit the ocean still spinning, this could happen with Michael. Time will tell and time is moving fast this morning.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/25/us/remnants-of-hurricane-danny-bring-havoc-to-north-carolina.html
https://www.apnews.com/fc5289663b458bb005da24ff549715ca Click on the image below or read the story in the link. Danny was a much weaker storm moving fast intact, what damage could Category 4 (maybe soon Cat 5) Hurricane Michael do? We will know soon.
Both of these hurricanes below were "back door" visitors to the Carolinas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Danny_(1997)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ivan
Backdoor hurricanes in these parts do happen but they are rare and far apart. Old records from the old town of Salem wrote of much damage to trees and buildings from a hurricane that crossed the area going towards the ocean that probably took a track similar to this one, but we have little records other than of the damage to the area we now know of as Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Better to be on the backside of such a hurricane than waiting for it to make landfall along the Gulf of Mexico.
A hurricane of this magnitude is not as much unprecedented as it is undocumented. We have remnants of scattered information from the survivors of such cataclysmic events. Before the middle of the 20th century most people had no clue how hurricanes worked vs a violent, severe summer storm. There were great meteorologists who knew but their work was not widely disseminated and there was little warning when a huge, hurricane slammed into the growing boom towns in that region. Now you see beach towns and fishing towns, but once upon the time they were building cities that they thought would become the new cotton capital of the South. Those dreams were blown away and Pt. St. Joe is one of the best examples of such a tragic loss of life from hurricanes. Were they a Cat 3 or Cat 4 or more ??? Whatever documentation was blown away as were the people who lived there and in some of the other towns. Much like Indianola Texas ... Port St. Joe then called Port Joseph was blown away and is now a beautiful shadow of the dreams of it's early founders. That part of the Gulf of Mexico is heaven on Earth until it becomes HELL on Earth. Major Hurricane Michael is bringing that hell onto shore and though we think it's unprecedented it's more undocumented as time began way before the Native Americans were pushed West towards Oklahoma and Manifest Destiny spread out in all directions across the US including the wealthy, healthy, beautiful towns along the coast in the early 1800s.
So remember that please. Rather than becoming Savannah or Charleston towns like Indianola Texas and Port Joseph became relegated to being beautiful beach towns. As for Panama City, it has it's place in history as well and by tomorrow evening we will know if Michael made landfall closer to Port. St. Joe or Panama City or some town you never heard of that was exactly in the center of the eye at landfall. But the storm itself is bigger than the exact point of landfall and the storm surge
"We have never seen a Category 4 come into..." is what Stephanie Abrams keeps saying and she is right... we have "never seen it" but it has happened over time it's just not documented as much like the Cape Fear colony there is no record of what happened in those small towns decimated by some other Monster Hurricane. Nuff said.
Some Tweets online.
They just taped it up and left.
Never put tape on the windows.
It's not worth your time you need to evacuate...
I'll be back later.
I'll proof later.
Forgive any mistakes.
Think on what I said.
Remember this........
Storm Surge.
Winds that will rip rooftops off at Landfall.
Devastation at the Coast.
Tornadoes FAR from the CONE
From Florida to the Carolinas.
That includes parts of Alabama...
as the front collides with Michael.
I95 Travel is going to be HORRIBLE
Please rethink any travel on I95 tomorrow.
Trees crash down.
Twisters happen.
Flash Flooding.
Power Out.
What else can I say?
If you live in an shaded area............
....or expect to travel through this area.
Think seriously on what you need to do to prepare.
And if you are traveling think again.
I'll be back later.
Besos BobbiStorm
Labels: Alabama, Carolinas, cat5, Category4, Florida, Georiga, History, hurrianemichael, hurricane, Majorhurricane. Panamacity, Michael, NC, PortStJoe, SC, weather
posted by BobbiStorm @ 5:13 AM
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