re: Hurricane/Tropical Storm Idalia Discussion Thread

This came from the wave fixing to move off Africa tonight and tomorrow

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The last frame of the latest run

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I’ll say this, if a storm enters the gulf already somewhat organized with a low shear environment those SSTs will cause some intense RI

Storms and Flash Flood Warnings in SoCal and NV well ahead of Hurricane Hilary.



Not hard to see why this will be problematic.

@pppapin has a good post about the overall setup.
LINK

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it should be 80-90% above normal, for the areas colored dark maroon/brownish: all of LA, East Texas, most of Oklahoma and Arkansas, and parts of Miss, Ala, GA and FL.

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We should be honored we have a CNN meteorologist giving us the truth.

Ya'll gonna have some overcooked gumbo.

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Have some PTSD from previous floods so I’ll take heat over heavy rains any day (not that this system would cause issue, just cautious)

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This one has a ton of steering so it isn’t hanging around long

The news is about to cover this 24/7 for weeks. Can’t wait to hear what term they come up with for “heavy rains in an area of sand and rock causes a flood.”

I miss rain and this heat sucks.

YouTube has some fascinating videos of desert flash floods.

The first radar casualty of Hilary is already on the board. KESX in southern NV is down. Not even sure how that happened.

ETA: It was lightning.

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there's a zone of excess heat in the Gulf, a horizontal shelf of deep tropical water on a line from about 100 miles south of Cameron, LA to 100 miles south of Port St Joe FL, which is superheated (well over 90° F).

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No.

The Loop Current has migrated north into the GoM (nothing unusual about that) and shed a warm eddy to its northwest rotating clockwise. Their temperatures are slightly above 90 f, not "well over" 90 f, also ordinary for this time of year. This chart shows their location with estimated velocity, not temps.



August 17th temps below are expressed in celsius; 30 c = 86 f while 32 c = 89.6 f.



To correlate the visual of temperature, which can sometimes look like a continuous blob, it's useful to view Sea Surface Height.



Hot water as we know rises above colder, causing a "bump" in sea surface height relative to MSL (the precise datum is converted from satellite orbit datum, immaterial for this discussion and close enough). SSHs are calculated from satellite microwave observations.

The LC and Eddy are slightly above 2 meters higher than mean sea level.

Yes, GoM waters are warm this summer, but not unusually so compared to their normal seasonal values.