Saturday, October 30, 2010

Tropical Storm Shary and Hurricane Tomas: October 30, Update A

Gosh! THANK YOU for the welcome back to this side of the pond! I wanted to let you know I've read all your notes and will try and answer as soon as I can. You guys are great. :-)
 
Tropical Storm Shary:
Officially, she briefly became a hurricane earlier today (either that or I was halucinating) but has now lost her tropical characteristics. I don't think she was actually a hurricane because she had already lost her tropical flavour, but the wind speed could have picked up as she merged with a front and as the intensity of these storms are based solely on wind speed they had her as a weak hurricane for a smidge (a very small unit of time ;-)). She's currently centered at 39.2N, 50.9W and is moving NE at 48mph - gee whiz but that's fast! At those speeds she is clearly already part of a frontal system. The NHC have issued their last advisory on this system. Central pressure was 991mb and winds were 70mph in their last advisory.
 
And some of our friends on Bermuda weren't on the island as she zoomed past. Nope. They were in a much better place. They were in a boat in the Atlantic. Can't beat that when a storm is going by. I got this from Steve B.:

"tell me about it. We're hove to at 29 12N 64 20W on the way back from Puerto Rica. Lovely way to spend a Friday night. Rock and rolling."
 
Hopefully 'the way back' doesn't involve a detour south into the Caribbean!  
 
This is my last entry on Shary.
 
Hurricane Tomas:
Not surprisingly, Tomas is now a hurricane - those areas of offset vorticity I mentioned yesterday came into alignment. His center is at 13.5N, 61.7W, and he is moving WNW at 9mph. He is a pretty strong cat 1 storm at the moment with winds of 90mph (cat 1 range: 74-95mph) and I have no doubt he will intensify further because wind shear is not very strong and sea surface temperatures are a warm 29-30 deg C. Central pressure is currently 982mb. He has crossed into the Caribbean, but is still causing some havoc on the southern windward islands. He's beginning to look good with a nice eye trying to form. Vorticity is strong throughout the troposphere, and convection is really good. The islands will continue to experience strong thunderstorms for at least another day or two. I'll look at the track in more detail tomorrow - I crashed this machine trying to have a look at that stuff today.  

On a related but unrelated note ... one of my fabulous readers (and our Caribbean reporter) Tom is married to Sheri.  These two storms were for you guys (only literally though ;-)).
 
Until the morrow!
J.
 
Blog archives 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 was there and was going to "run away, run away" (Monty Python), I'll let you know.
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