Roger J Smith

You may be interested in following the data from an ocean buoy located north of the current location of Wilma's eye, near 20N 85W. The link is: www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=42056 Then I would also recommend browsing through this site, to find other regions such as your own, where a number of ocean buoy reports are updated hourly. Over here, the current emphasis is on how bad this storm could be for Cancun and the "Mayan Riviera" as it is known, but much depends on how close the eyewall comes to the coastline tomorrow. I'm seeing signs of a more NW to NNW direction which could eventually lead to either a near miss or a situation where the western side of the eyewall brushes the coastline. Then it's apparently on to south Florida, possibly very far south like almost missing the mainland, but placing Miami close to the eye on Sunday night or Monday morning. Many feel that the hurricane will weaken gradually when it makes the eastward turn, partly due to land interaction from Cuba, and partly because of shear. I'm thinking it will at least weaken gradually to about a 2/3 borderline storm as it approaches the Everglades. Then the hurricane will try to redevelop in a very fast SW flow east of Florida and the Carolinas Monday, arriving on the scene of a very deep low forming near Long Island around Monday. This situation could lead to an intense storm that then moves over parts of New England and eastern Canada. This could all end up approaching the British Isles Thursday or Friday. I've noticed on some models that the Monday-Tuesday low which promotes a warm southerly flow may then develop a strong secondary on Wednesday near 48N 10W, so if that's true there could be one substantial storm around mid-week and another one towards the weekend of next week.

This seems to be an area of the Caribbean where very low pressures can develop. Mitch was not too far to the west of this location and made it to around 900 mb, and Gilbert was located around where Wilma should be in 24 hours when it bottomed out at 885 mb. I was just looking at a satellite loop and it's quite astounding how rapidly Wilma developed from a rather incomplete system yesterday into a formidable looking circular hurricane today. The pressure fall over 48 hours is now in the area of 100 mb.

This extremely rapid development of Wilma from cat-1 about 24 hours ago to almost a cat-5 hurricane as of 0600z, involving a pressure drop of around 80 mb, is virtually unprecedented. This does not necessarily mean that the hurricane will be more intense than previously predicted when it reaches Florida, because this cycle of development could indicate a future tendency for a weakening trend. However, some of the models are indicating an environment for Wilma that is fairly similar to Charley in August 2004, which could mean that southwest Florida may face a cat-4 landfall somewhere around Fort Myers to Naples on Friday. After crossing Florida around Friday night, Wilma seems destined to move in one of two directions, depending on which models you prefer. One set of tracks brings the hurricane into the central Atlantic and presumably it would end up (in extra-tropical form) near the British Isles around Oct 27-28. The other cluster of tracks is more dangerous for New England and eastern Canada, with the European model showing a very fast-moving and deep storm hitting Maine and New Brunswick. Frankly, I find the central Atlantic scenario more plausible, but it's not even a sure thing that Wilma will escape the Caribbean yet -- it could still veer more west and come inland in the Yucatan or even swerve into Honduras, but the models are downplaying those possibilities.

The pinhole eye indicates very rapid rotation of the eyewall as part of the ongoing rapid intensification process. As you've probably noted, Wilma has deepened by about 40 mb in the past 12 hours. This eye will probably increase in size through Wednesday and there is a good chance that Wilma will intensify to cat-4 or even cat-5 now. Looks like the northeast tip of the Yucatan may be brushed by Wilma late Thursday then the eventual landfall will be around Naples FL south of Fort Myers, but all areas on Florida's Gulf coast will be on high alert for a possible strike Friday night or Saturday.

The delay may be deliberate as the NHC would have to come up with a five day track and intensity forecast, and with the models basically spread all over the map in a very light steering environment, they might as well buy some time since "Wilma" is not going anywhere very fast in the first 48 hours. I have no gut feelings on where it will go after looking at the available evidence, possibly a rather complex track may evolve, taking it west for a while, then northwest, then northeast across western Cuba towards the Bahamas. Some models show a strong hurricane moving north along the Gulf Stream towards Cape Hatteras by mid to late week. The remnants of the former subtropical depression near Bermuda have drifted north towards Cape Cod and a very strong low is developing near 40N 68W overnight, bringing near hurricane force wind gusts to coastal Maine, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by 06z. There is a very slight chance that this storm will gain a name since its centre is still over 26C water as of 18z and a somewhat tropical looking circulation has begun to develop. This seems unlikely but after Wilma, the next named storms will be alpha and beta. I'm not sure what was wrong with Xavier, Yolanda and Zach, because what are they going to do if "alpha" proves to be a monster, retire the name?

No worries, my winter driving skills are actually quite good. <_<

Okay, I just read the discussion, they say it could theoretically have 65 kt winds in the eyewall but they really aren't too sure how strong it really is. Looking at it on satellite, I would be surprised if it was much more than 50 kt but in any case it is so small a system that it can't sustain hurricane status very long over 23C water tonight and tomorrow. The more significant question is how it interacts with the developing frontal system and larger low pressure area over northwest Spain. Then the whole thing could blow up into a more powerful storm than the predicted wet but not overly windy system being advertised almost everywhere in the models for Tuesday over the UK. There is a slight potential here for a screaming deep low on a different trajectory than the October 1987 storm so it's going to be a very interesting 24 hours.

Tropical storm Vince appears very small and seems unlikely to make it to hurricane status before becoming extratropical. I think it will just get swallowed up by the developing frontal wave further north tomorrow and add its moisture and energy to the developing rainfall event for parts of the UK as discussed in the net-weather warning. This whole situation is a little volatile so I'll keep an eye on it overnight your time while I am still wide awake, just in case Vince goes on a tear or starts a mega-storm chain of events which I think is about 5% possible in this situation.

I don't want to disrupt this thread too much, so I will just say for now that answers to the above questions will be forthcoming under a separate title in this forum. I need to check a couple of things with the "powers that be" here before I start placing this material on-line on your site. The short answer to the latitude question is yes, the experimental modelling does create a grid of both "timing lines" and something I call meteo-latitude, since the system is not aligned exactly with the terrestrial lines of latitude and longitude, but adjusted to fit the earth's magnetic field. What that means for the UK is that systems at about 45N 40W would be expected to proceed to 10N 55W if all sectors in between were under similar conditions in the model's cause-and-effect parameters. In other words, the grid system that I use follows mean 500-mb flow patterns more or less. I think it might be a week or two before I even have a clear concept of what I want to post here on this research. The work is already out for peer review here and there, but I don't expect rapid results. This research does not boil down to some 8-page paper that somebody can read over a weekend and form an opinion right away. And being somewhat cynical about the acceptance thresh-hold for new ideas in the field, I would say that this opinion would be skewed towards the negative. Too bad temperatures in the UK in winter don't have the same bias, right? Or are there some hidden mild rampers out there? (I've got something for every kind of ramper in Santa's bag of goodies -- sorry, Father Christmas, whatever -- this is going to be the mother of all variable winters -- everyone will be claiming success for their forecasts unless they predict a long dreary stretch of near normal bland weather -- that is likely to bust).

As far as charts that go +360 and +384 being accurate, I seem to recall a discussion on this site when I first joined a few weeks ago about a big cold outbreak being advertised for Sep 29-30 over the UK. Well, some of the elements of that verified and some didn't, I would have to observe. I think the maps I recall seeing showed a weak low crossing the North Sea with a massive NW flow following behind it. In reality, what's likely to verify at forecast time is a strong low north of the North Sea with a brief shot of colder air reaching mainly Scotland. This illustrates my earlier-stated principle that computer models will eventually run out of steam as unforeseen but major energy developments overwhelm the calculations of system evolution. This should surprise nobody, really -- it is a matter of common knowledge in meteorology that weather systems have life cycles of about 5-8 days and for any computer model, no matter how reliable through 96-120 hours, to try to compute what today's frontal wave south of Tokyo will look like on Day 15 when it is (after two or three major transformations and a picked up tropical system or two) cruising towards Ireland, is just beyond their capability. It may forever remain there because as I was mentioning earlier, there could very well be external factors in the complex cause-and-effect of meteorology, factors such as geomagnetic energy, interactions between our atmosphere, magnetic field and solar-system magnetic field, that have to be understood in order to go that far forward with a forecast. I'll put this in much simpler terms. Suppose you're on a motorway in good visibility and you can see miles ahead of you. You can then make realistic predictions of where you will be five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes from now. But then try to imagine where you'll be in an hour, or two hours, if your journey then takes you into a large city. Even if you stay on the same motorway, your calculations, while subject to less error, are still more and more theoretical and prone to error. Or, just use the widely accepted logic of the NHC in hurricane track forecasting, itself one of the less accurate of the many things that weather models do on a regular basis. The 24-hour error may be 50 miles, the 5-day error may be 300 miles, and the 10-day error in the rare cases when a tropical system can be predicted for ten days, is virtually half the width of the Atlantic Ocean. Since the average long wave in the atmosphere is about the width of the Atlantic Ocean, these longer-range model errors start to become quasi-random. What I was saying above about timing theoretical events and using the one example of October 23-24, I could just elaborate briefly on that. My research is mainly in North America and I'm extending it to western Europe in more detail this year to try to build up the basis for global modelling of longer range forecasts. My research system uses a grid of timing lines in the atmosphere, so that predictable events that I believe are associated with weather events can be timed and therefore located on these timing lines. I am working around the idea that there are nine main timing lines around the northern and probably southern hemispheres. Four of these that I am more used to working with are off the west coast of North America, another in the lee of the Rockies, then another through the Great Lakes and mid-Atlantic states, and a fourth near the east coast of Newfoundland. The next one downstream from these is apparently through Ireland and southwest England (the timing lines tend to be somewhat curved in a NNW-SSE orientation). You could do the math and figure out where the others are, approximately. Therefore, what I am looking at is the timing of energy (low pressure systems or frontal waves) across these timing lines. There is also the question of latitude and intensity to consider, and that's part of the research as well. Without going into more detail, October 23-24 represents a strong energy peak where weather systems should be crossing these timing lines. Since I expect the long-term flow pattern to remain essentially zonal or fast WSW for much of October, I would be looking for this event to be a deep low somewhere near Ireland on the 23rd. I'm more at the observing than forecasting stage of this part of the research now. When the winter closes in, I'll list some other dates for possible major weather systems and some ideas about what to expect from them. I've said elsewhere that I'm looking for a mild, windy and stormy winter pattern that evolves into a cold blocking pattern in February, so these individual storm possibilities would be within that context. I wouldn't bet much on a white Christmas, there's a deep low indicated for Dec 26 near 60N 10W.

Could see some snow on highest peaks of Scotland Saturday, coldest air sweeps across the region around 09-15z then there is gradual warming at most elevations Sunday. I don't think there will be any snow below 3000 ft though. On this subject of accuracy of models, I have been taking similar notes over North America for the Canadian global model, which is probably about on a par with the GFS. I have roughly the same perceptions, that it is generally accurate on large scale patterns 96 hours and to some extent 120 hours in advance. There are a few exceptions, though. For example, a very strong east coast storm developed rapidly from the Gulf of Mexico on Dec 24, 2000 and by the 26th it was a 958 mb low near Halifax, NS. Before the 72h forecast there was little hint of this system. All of the North American models had a poor 96h forecast track for Katrina, placing it near Panama City FL at the time when it was actually approaching New Orleans. I was actively forecasting in the mid 1970s and the models at that stage were fairly reliable to perhaps 36h so things certainly do show a steady improvement. The factor that might place a ceiling on model accuracy beyond 144h is that the energy producing weather systems may be (according to research I am doing) partly supplied by interactions between the earth's magnetic field, atmosphere and the solar system magnetic field. If that is so, you can understand that no matter how sophisticated the computer models become and how much data we acquire to initialize them, they will have no further capability than they do today to anticipate the peaks of energy that might become available ten or fifteen days ahead of time. There is also, within this, the second question of whether or not such interactions would all be predictable, or whether some of them are random (Sun emits flares at day 8 of forecast with effects on earth's weather from day 10 onward, for example). I have not really made that much progress on that question, but from a theoretical point of view, there is no guarantee that super-computers will necessarily be able to produce accurate long-range forecasts more than about ten days in advance, unless we understand these processes and can incorporate them into the models. The way that one researches such a question is to produce long-range forecasts from a theoretical model, beyond the time horizon, where accuracy or lack thereof would give an indication of the validity of the assumptions being made. I am doing that on a regular basis, which is partly why I have expanded my work day from the previous 12 hours to a more intensive 14-16 by looking in detail at the UK and western Europe. I also look in less detail at other regions. Part of the research is to compare timing functions in different regions, to see how postulated cause and effect actually plays out on a regional basis, not just in the original area of interest, North America. To give one example of this, I will be checking weather maps for strong low pressure near the UK on various dates that I have identified as likely candidates for storm development. Once I get enough info, I will use this to make long-range forecasts that would provide a basis for "how to" extend the models beyond the 10-day time frame where they normally devolve into a sort of random noise at present. All of the above assumes that various other meteorological principles would remain in play into this longer time frame, so that it's a blend between the external cause and effect and the more conventional energy cycles of atmosphere, SST and all the factors that go into the working parts of the GFS type models already. To give one example of a strong low affecting the UK, likely to occur beyond the usual time horizon of the models, mark down October 23-24.

Great pictures there, Conor. Did you know those clouds in the top picture are "mammatus" which are often seen around severe thunderstorms?

Looks to me as though Rita is interacting with a growing upper vortex and this is producing a rather erratic forward motion with two pronounced wobbles past nine hours, first to the due west, then northwest, now more west again. I don't see a lot of weakening yet, and the storm will probably hit the coast just west of the TX-LA border around 09z (in 24h) as either a weak cat-4 or strong cat-3. However, the path is becoming so erratic that a last-minute wobble to the west is going to place Galveston Bay in the path of the eyewall. This could still be a second Katrina type impact in a very significant economic target area. I think the model scenarios showing a stall or a loop around will probably bust, it's more likely that Rita will gradually weaken and fall apart inland with the moisture gradually streaming northeast in a few days time.

Not sure how widely known this is in Britain, I imagine many of you have heard about the 1900 storm that destroyed Galveston, known nowadays as the Great Galveston Hurricane. It originated much further east than Rita, and crossed central Cuba before taking up a position in the southeast Gulf a little further north than Tuesday's location for Rita. From there, it steamed directly towards Galveston and crossed the western half of the island where the city is located on the night of September 8-9, 1900. It is estimated that the storm was then a cat-4 hurricane, no real telling what it was over the central Gulf earlier. The city was virtually reduced to rubble by the hurricane and storm surge, and the death toll is estimated to have been 8,000 (some say 12,000) or about one in six of the people who lived there in 1900. This still remains the largest death toll from a natural event in North America, so far the known death toll from Katrina stands at about 1200 and may level off around two to three thousand. The storm basically altered the economic geography of Texas and made Houston a much more prominent city just as the oil boom was about to begin. They built a 15-foot seawall (we'll see how much use that is) along the Gulf shoreline but of course the inner coast of the island is much less protected and a high storm surge could flood in from all sides. Houston is fairly far inland but not far above sea level, and in a worst-case scenario substantial parts of the city could be under water to a depth of a few feet at least as tidal surges hold back the drainage of local rivers and these flood due to heavy rains. Houston is notorious for flooding in heavy rainfall events without any wind or tidal surge components. From what I'm seeing on the latest progs and surface obs the most likely landfall for Rita may be around Freeport TX which is about 30 miles southwest of Galveston. The storm is so large and powerful that this separation may not mean much, as people were saying above, the strongest winds will be on the forward side of the eyewall. Time to check for the latest update, somebody is sure to post it. (time is 22nd 0858z)

Rita has grown into as strong a storm as Katrina or Camille, and has from its very first stages been on a very consistent forward track. This regularity of forward motion is always associated with major landfalling hurricanes. From the research I have been doing on hurricanes for many years, I believe that ultimately the cause of such storms can be found in some kind of disturbance in solar system magnetic field sectors that link the Sun to the large outer planets. When planets Mercury or Venus move through these strong fields they send a strong disturbance outward past the earth and then out towards the outer planets. You can see in this theory that the "eye" would be the signature of the small inner planet moving through the field sector. In this case, Mercury is moving between Jupiter and the Sun. About 24 days ago, Mercury was moving between Saturn and the Sun. Although this is unpublished research, I can say that it is not an entirely maverick idea -- various other researchers are looking at connections between solar output, field sectors, and terrestrial weather. This theory would help to explain the rather mysterious aspect of the regularity of forward motion of hurricanes which can be seen from one year to another, the rather obvious way that they follow the curved structures of the earth's magnetic field, and would point to some periodicities in hurricane frequency. At the same time, there are many unanswered questions in this line of investigation, so it's probably fair to say that the theory is in a developmental stage. By the way, I have CNN on live here and they were just saying that the new update had come in for Rita, the central pressure had fallen to 898 mb, and there is even a suggestion of further strengthening. There has been talk of wind gusts near 200-220 mph in the eyewall of this storm now. You may have noticed this, temperatures along the Gulf coast and inland into Texas have been at record high levels near 38-40C except in the sea breeze zone, and so this storm has a monstrous potential to draw upon as it approaches land. I don't even think that the near-shore shallow water factor will mean anything because this water has been superheated by land breezes all day today, the Galveston buoy is reporting water temps near 30C. Expect a landfall 30-60 miles southwest of Galveston near Freeport TX, perhaps as far west as Port O'Connor, with towns such as Bay City right in the firing line. On this course, the Galveston and Houston areas with all of their oil refining facilities will be very close to the worst forward section winds and storm surge. A direct hit between Freetown and Galveston would be the worst case scenario but anything east of Port O'Connor would probably mean a $10-billion plus hit on the American economy. You have to ask yourself, what are the chances of two cat-5 hurricanes in one season, even within 30 days and virtually over the same spot? Not much more than 1 in 500, I would speculate.