Oh, Darn
Despite almost frantic cheerleading in the press yesterday, the third named storm of this year's hurricane season appears to have run out of steam and will not develop into a hurricane. Frankly, here it is already August and this is only the third named storm so far. And it was wimpy even before it lost strength today. I saw repeated, almost hysterical stories yesterday predicting it was going to become a hurricane.
At 8 a.m. EDT, Chris had top maximum sustained winds of 40 mph, just 1 mph above the minimum to be a named storm and down 20 mph from Wednesday night, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The center of the storm was about 285 miles east-southeast of Grand Turk Island.
The third named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season was moving west-northwest near 12 mph and was expected to move away from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands later Thursday, forecasters said.
"It's pretty much a skeleton at this point," hurricane specialist Jamie Rhome said. He said the thunderstorms that a tropical system needs to grow have been blown away by other winds in the atmosphere. Forecasters now think it isn't very likely that it will become a hurricane, but intensity predictions are tough to make.
"Some storms do make a comeback and some storms never ever come back," he said.
I'm waiting for the stern pronouncements about global warming causing this devastation to this year's much ballyhooed dire predictions of unstoppable hurricanes of mammoth proportions.
Or something.
World news | Gaius Thursday, 3 August , 2006
By Black Jack, Thursday, 3 August , 2006 @ 11:32 am
The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling:
JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - Snow fell on South Africa’s biggest city Johannesburg for the first time in 25 years as icy temperatures gripped vast swathes of the country, the weather office said.
By crosspatch, Thursday, 3 August , 2006 @ 11:33 am
By this date last year, tropical storm Harvey was churning … the 8th named storm of the year.
Basically the reason for the lack of storms this year is a strong Bermuda High which has increased trade wind speeds. This does two things … the increased trade winds cause an increase in evaporative cooling and so sea surface temperatures are lower than they were in 04 and 05. Also, the increased winds aloft associated with the stronger high pressure cause an increase in “wind shear” which basically blows the top off the storm before it has a chance to fully form over an area of convection.
You can’t directly associate land air temperatures in North America with sea surface temperatures and wind conditions in the Atlantic Ocean and the media’s attempts to correlate the two have resulted in some eggy faces.
By Gaius, Thursday, 3 August , 2006 @ 12:38 pm
Yeah, I had already seen that, Black Jack. I’ve got it posted now.