Hurricane Joaquin: October 4, Update A

Hurricane Joaquin is passing to the west-northwest of Bermuda, however his outer bands did go over the island. Luckily for Bermuda, he was not as strong as he was over the Bahamas! 

He is currently at 32.6N, 65.9W, about 65 miles from Bermuda, heading NNE at 14mph. The satellite images show us that he is considerably weaker now, and continues to weaken:

The NHC still have him as a mid-sized cat 2 storm, with winds of 100mph, central pressure of 961 mb (cat 2 range: 96-110mph). I think this is an large over-estimate of his winds given his structure and convection and I think he's really a weak cat 1 storm now. 

Regarding rainfall, they say that Bermuda should expect 3-5 inches of rain overnight. Here's the radar from Bermuda showing the surface rainfall in mm/hour:

3-5 inches is about 76-127 mm of rainfall. From the radar, even if you got 4mm/hour (on average), that mean it would have to rain solidly at that rate for 19 - 31 hours (tonight!). Hmm. Isn't mathematics fun? That is a very very long night! I'd be interested to see if that is how much you get. By the way, you can find the radar loop for this at: http://www.weather.bm/tools/animateimages.asp?name=RADAR_250KM_SRI. 

Speaking of rainfall, I saw that South Carolina got a wallop and half of rain! Crickey! Here's the water vapor satellite imagery for the US:

You can see that the predominant source of rain was that front that spans from south to north over a number of states, with some (but not too much) of the moisture being pulled in from Joaquin. 

Between the US east coast (esp. S. Carolina) and France flooding, H. Joaquin, Typhoon Mujigae (hit China as a cat 1), TS Choi-Wan, TS Oho, its a bit of a busy day in the weather-world!  

Ooof, I think it's time for a Sunday evening G&T!
Toodles,
J.

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DISCLAIMER: These remarks are just what I think/see regarding tropical storms - not the opinion of any organization I represent. If you are making an evacuation decision, please heed your local emergency management and the National Hurricane Center's official forecast and the National Weather Service announcements. This is not an official forecast. If I "run away, run away" (Monty Python), I'll let you know.