Hurricane Hunters walloped by Felix
NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft N42RF experienced a truly awesome and terrifying mission into the heart of Hurricane Felix last night. Flying at 10,000 feet through Felix at 7pm EDT last night, N42RF dropped a sonde into the southeast eyewall. The swirling winds of the storm were so powerful that the sonde spun a full 3/4 circle around the eye before splashing into the northwest eyewall. It is VERY rare for a sonde to make nearly a complete circle around the eye like this. As the plane entered the eye of the now Category 5 hurricane, they found a 17-mile wide stadium lit up by intense lightning on all sides. The pressure at the bottom of the eye had hit 934 mb, and the temperature outside, a balmy 77 degrees at 10,000 feet. This is about 24 degrees warmer than the atmosphere normally is at that altitude, and a phenomenally warm eye for a hurricane. N42RF then punched into the northwest eyewall. Flight level winds hit 175 mph, and small hail lashed the airplane as lighting continued to flash. Then, the crew hit what Hurricane Hunters fear most--a powerful updraft followed a few seconds later by an equally powerful downdraft. The resulting extreme turbulence and wind shear likely made the aircraft impossible to control. Four G's of acceleration battered the airplane, pushing the aircraft close to its design limit of 6 G's. Although no one was injured and no obvious damage to the airplane occurred, the aircraft commander wisely aborted the mission and N42RF returned safely to St. Croix. N42RF is the same aircraft that survived a pounding of 5.6 g's in the eyewall of Hurricane Hugo in 1989. A special inspection of the aircraft is planned for today to determine if it is fit to fly further missions into Felix, and its scheduled afternoon flight into the hurricane was canceled. Hurricane Hunter missions since have fared better, and no more extreme turbulence has been reported.
Some good news for Central America
Although Hurricane Felix has intensified into a truly awesome and potentially catastrophic hurricane, the prospects of a major flooding catastrophe in Honduras and Nicaragua are much lower today than they appeared yesterday. Firstly, the dramatic intensification cycle has spun Felix into a very small, tight coil. A storm of this small size is much less likely to pull in moisture from the Pacific Ocean over the mountains of Honduras like Hurricane Fifi of 1974 did. Secondly, the strong ridge of high pressure pushing Felix westward has intensified, resulting in a greater forward speed for the hurricane. Felix is now moving at 21 mph, and will not slow much during its passage over Honduras. This will keep rainfall amounts lower than I expected. Thirdly, it now appears likely that Felix will hit the Honduras/Nicaragua border area, a very sparsely populated region known as "The Mosquito Coast", because of its large expanse of marshy wetlands. This track will result in the rapid weakening of Felix, limiting the rainfall from the storm. A passage just north of Honduras would have been far more disastrous. It will still be bad for Honduras--NHC is predicting 5-8 inches of rain, with isolated amounts up to 12 inches--but this is far short of the 20+ inches of rain that fell during catastrophic Hurricane Fifi and again in 1999 during Category 5 Hurricane Mitch. The nations of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico can also breather easier, as Felix's rains should not cause the kind of extreme flooding a larger storm would have caused. It now appears the Felix will stay too far south to be influenced by the trough of low pressure forecast to move across the U.S. later this week, so Texas appears safe from the storm.