Hurricane Gert and the Atlantic Stormlings: August 15, Update A

Sorry my peeps! I was busy – work, travel, work, following current events and drinking wine, work, drinking wine, work, eating ice cream. You know, the usual things. J I think the rest of this year may be a season of relatively short updates, but we’ll see how things go.

In the meantime, Hurricane Gert is out there in the Atlantic and has been for a few days. She currently has winds of 85mph, central pressure of 979mb. She’s at 34.8N, 70.3W, heading NE at a good 15mph. She is a pretty good looking little storm:

It looks like she is weakening a little at the moment as the really strong convection (the red area in the satellite image above) is getting smaller. This may be a temporary cycle – slightly too soon to say at the moment. She is definitely a hurricane because there is a vorticity (circulation) signal throughout the troposphere – even at the 200mb level as you can see here:

And until that goes away, she will remain a hurricane.

She has been a reasonably well-behaved storm so far, doing her very best to avoid as many landmasses as possible. I guess she figured that there wasn’t any point hitting anything over the last few days as there isn’t much space in the news these days for natural storms when man-made storms are brewing fast and furious – here in the US at any rate.

I will try and be back tomorrow. I see there are three little Stormlings^TM (ooh, I just created a new category ;-)... it's the technical term for the yellow ‘x’s’ that the NHC have on their map, which means a chance of a storm developing is less than 30%) out there:

I think two of these may actually be close to being Tropical Storms because the lower half of the troposphere has a good vorticity (circulation) signal, which you can see in this 500mb (middle troposphere) circulation map:

The only reason they aren’t quite there yet is because the convection in both cases is a little on the weak side of wobbly:

The next three named storms are: Harvey, Irma, and Jose.

Until tomorrow,

Ciao!

J.

p.s. It's the 70th Anniversary of the Partition... there are some amazing stories of what people went through then (including my Dad's, which I have read and hope to one day be able to share), so if you have a chance and find some, check them out! 

Blogs archived at http://jyotikastorms.blogspot.com/
Twitter @JyovianStorm
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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.  

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