After strengthening over land for more than half a day, Tropical Storm Fay finally began to deteriorate yesterday evening, and this morning, as it sits over Cape Canaveral, it looks like a shadow of its former self. Top sustained winds are down to 45 mph (from an overland peak of 65 mph), and pressure is up to 994 mb.
Although Hurricane Watches are still in effect along the Florida and Georgia coasts, Fay no longer appears a serious threat to reach hurricane strength. Alan Sullivan writes:
[Fay] has lost its symmetrical structure. The remaining convection consists of bands in the north and east quadrants. NASA buoys report sea temperature have fallen 5 [degrees Fahrenheit] off the Cape, as prolonged convection and wind have used up Fay’s “fuel.” In these circumstances, the storm is unlikely to regenerate, despite favorable upper level winds. Slow weakening should countinue.
My concern for Savannah was unjustified. Models no longer take Fay significantly offshore, either. The storm should drift along the coast near Daytona Beach, then turn left and cross to the extreme NE Gulf. But the water there is also cooler than it was a week ago, after a stalled front caused continuous thunderstorm activity for many days. Again this is an area where the “fuel” for a hurricane has been used up. Fay’s remnant may exist for many days yet, as a vague rainy swirl on a slow erratic course.
Unfortunately, most of the models do not send that “vague rainy swirl” to the most severely drought-stricken regions of the South.
UPDATE: The Hurricane Watches have been dropped as of 11am EDT.
UPDATE 2: On an unrelated note, there is good news about the health of leukemia-stricken weatherblogger Alan Sullivan. A few days ago, I mentioned his condition after he wrote poignantly about “the reality of the end game.” Today, however, he writes: “My dire concern about health — reinforced by my doctor’s dark talk of kidney failure — has proven as alarmist as the reports on tropical storm Fay.” His current condition, he says, remains “disturbing, but preferable to the death-door situation that seemed to prevail a week ago, when I visited the clinic at Tamarac. I called off today’s appointment. I’ll stay on the regimen [of palliatives] another week, and we’ll see how I fare. Maybe I get to see the election after all.”
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3 Comments
1. SteveSadlov:Show me the data justifying the claim that there were 65 MPH sustained winds, let alone, 60MPH sustained winds, at any point during this storm’s track over Florida. I would love to see those data. The (public domain, NOAA) data I have examined seem to indicate that at most, sustained winds were 50 to 55 MPH. Winds such as these occurred during two general periods, firstly, as the storm cross the Keys, and secondly, as it wobbled over the Western shores of Okeechobee.
Aug 20, 2008 - 10:16 am 2. Brendan Loy:Steve, I think that’s a question for the Tropical Cyclone Report at the end of the season. As I’m sure you know, intensities are sometimes adjusted up or down in those reports. We’ll see.
As things stand, it seems fairly obvious to me that the NHC made a reasonable, contemporaneous estimate (it’s always an estimate) of maximum sustained winds (remember, it’s supposed to be a maximum; it’s not an assertion that those wind speeds are widespread) based on all available data, which includes not just anemometers (which cannot be everywhere) but observations based on satellite, radar, pressure, recon, etc. Maybe the estimate was a little off. If so, that’s hardly something to make a federal case over. I fail to see how calling Fay a 65 mph tropical storm, instead of 55 mph, would meaningfully advance the dreaded Al Gore Agenda.
In any event, your confident prediction that the NHC would conspiratorially “count-pad” by declaring Fay a hurricane just before landfall — when such a declaration would be unverifiable — and would then say “it weakened immediately after landfall,” was obviously not borne out by the facts. Nothing of the sort occurred. I guess they weren’t “clearly rigging it to play a game they’ve played before” after all.
If anything, NHC was conservative in not upgrading Fay to a hurricane yesterday over land, when based on radar, barometric pressure, etc., they could easily have justified saying that it was probably a minimal hurricane, and the ground instruments in the particular locales where they happen to exist just weren’t picking it up. Even Alan Sullivan, who is the very antithesis of an alarmist or count-padder or AGW hype-monger, thought Fay might be a hurricane yesterday over land. But the NHC held off, because the raw data didn’t support it.
Basically, yesterday was a very bad day for your NHC/AGW conspiracy-theory nonsense, so now you’re quibbling over 5 or 10 mph, still assuming the worst rather than giving them the benefit the doubt and waiting for the end-of-season report to learn more about the data. Lame.
Aug 20, 2008 - 10:23 am 3. Brendan Loy:P.S. Something else to consider: because of the way the NHC rounds up & rounds down from knots to mph, there is no such thing as a 55 mph tropical storm. It’s either 50 or 60. (45 kt x 1.15 = 51.75 mph, which rounds down to 50 mph. 50 kt x 1.15 = 57.5, which rounds up to 60 mph.) So, when you say “sustained winds were 50 to 55 MPH,” even if you are correct, it isn’t necessarily obvious that 50 mph was the correct estimate. 60 mph might be equally justifiable, based on that data, depending on what the other data said. In which case, in taking issue with the 65 mph designation, you’re quibbling over 5 mph, for like, what, three hours? Six hours? And at a time when there was conflicting data. Again: lame.
Aug 20, 2008 - 10:36 am