data buoy 42058 experiencing hurricane matthew
The bottom line:
–Matthew poses a very serious risk to the western Greater Antilles early next week.
–A trek over the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, Cuba, and/or Haiti would dramatically weaken Matthew. At least some restrengthening would be possible over the Bahamas.
–Matthew could affect any part of the U.S. East Coast from Florida to Maine at some point from the middle of next week into the weekend.
–Long-range forecasts will vary, perhaps several times each day. Because the key features that will steer Matthew are very uncertain at this point, any given model shift may not mean much until the evolution of these features becomes better defined, which could take several days.
This time-lapse video taken from the space station on Aug. 30 shows Hurricanes Lester and Madeline in the Pacific Ocean, then Gaston in the Atlantic Ocean.
Consider, now, if the bad intensity forecasts for Hurricane Patricia had been made for a Hurricane Patricia clone that had ended up making landfall in a heavily populated area such as Miami, Galveston/Houston, Tampa, or New Orleans, but without the hurricane weakening dramatically at landfall. A 15-mile diameter area of 215 mph winds–EF5 tornado speeds–would have caused near-total destruction. Since the storm would have been significantly under-warned for, a full evacuation might not have been completed, resulting in one of the deadliest hurricane tragedies in human history. The ten-year drought in major hurricane landfalls in the U.S. is going to end someday, and an onslaught of major hurricanes like we experienced in 2004 - 2005–seven landfalls by major hurricanes in two years–could happen again.
NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photo on Oct. 2, 2015, from the International Space Station and wrote on Twitter, “Early morning shot of Hurricane #Joaquin from @space_station before reaching #Bahamas. Hope all is safe. #YearInSpace.”
For remote sensing experts, getting a glimpse of the eye of a hurricane or typhoon with CloudSat is like a golfer hitting a hole in one. Consider: the cloud-penetrating radar on CloudSat has a field of view of just 1.4 square kilometers (0.5 square miles), but Earth’s total surface area is 1,320 million square kilometers (510 million square miles). Most tropical cyclones are well over 400 kilometers (250 miles) wide.
Yet a perfect eye overpass is exactly what researchers got on May 16, 2015. At 2:07 p.m. local time (04:07 Universal Time), the satellite passed over the eye of Typhoon Dolphin as the category 4 storm churned over the Pacific Ocean.
In mid-May 2015, Ana became the first named tropical storm of the North Atlantic hurricane season. May is early to see large storms in the Atlantic; the season begins in earnest on June 1. But on May 10, Tropical Storm Ana made landfall along the Carolina coast and carried maximum sustained winds of 74 kilometers per hour (46 miles per hour).
Scientists took the opportunity to observe Ana’s wind dynamics with the International Space Station-Rapid Scatterometer (ISS-RapidScat). The instrument, which joined NASA’s Earth observing fleet in September 2015, measures ocean surface wind speed and direction from orbit on the International Space Station.
The image above was produced with data acquired by RapidScat as Ana approached the coast on the afternoon of May 8, 2015. Arrows represent the direction of near-surface winds. Shades of blue indicate the range of wind speeds (lighter blue and green represent faster-moving winds).
welcome to the 2015 north atlantic hurricane season
Typhoon Maysak strengthened into a super typhoon on March 31, reaching Category 5 hurricane status on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. ESA Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti captured this image while flying over the weather system on board the International Space Station.
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