Wilma's upgraded to a hurricane

[Topper]

Its official now ... just read the update on Yahoo about Wilma being upgraded to a level 1 hurricane.

After hearing Richard Hoagland on the airwaves last night I'd say he
might have miscalculated that tuning fork ... it appears to be ramping
up the spin.

I'm wondering if this is Russian Technology in the hands of Chevez?

[Shecoda]

Wilma most intense Atlantic storm on record


MSNBC News Services
Updated: 2:19 p.m. ET Oct. 19, 2005

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. - Gathering strength at a record pace, Hurricane Wilma grew into the most intense Atlantic storm ever recorded Wednesday — a Category 5 monster with 175 mph winds that is expected to make landfall somewhere on Florida’s west coast by late Saturday and then possibly make course for New England.

“People need to be prepared. Get ready for this,” said police Chief Bill Mauldin of Key West, a vulnerable city at the tip of the low-lying Florida Keys island chain.

The National Hurricane Center — which bases a storm’s strength on barometric pressure, not wind speed — said Wilma’s pressure had dropped to 882 millibars, the lowest minimum pressure ever measured in a hurricane in the Atlantic basin. Pressure drops as a hurricane gains strength, and the previous record was set by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 at 888 millibars.

Center meteorologist Hugh Cobb said Wilma also set a record for the most rapid strengthening ever recorded in a hurricane.

But Cobb added that Wilma wasn’t expected to keep its record strength for long, as higher disruptive atmospheric winds in the Gulf of Mexico should weaken it before landfall.

Still, forecasters warned the storm was “extremely dangerous.”

Early Wednesday, Wilma's hurricane force winds extended just 15 miles from the eye but by 11 a.m. ET that had widened to 50 miles. In addition, tropical storm force winds extend 160 miles out.

“This is going to become an even larger hurricane sizewise and wherever it strikes ... it will have an impact over a very, very large area,” National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield told a news conference Wednesday.

“We could have a very, very high storm surge” on Florida’s west coast, he warned.

Mayfield said that Wilma, after crossing Florida, could make its way north to New England, much of which is saturated from recent flooding.

Mayfield added that it was still to early to estimate where along Florida’s west coast Wilma would make landfall.


‘Aggressive storm’
In Florida, Monroe County officials have ordered visitors out of the Florida Keys starting at noon Wednesday, the first U.S. evacuations caused by Wilma. No timetable was given for residents to evacuate, but that was expected to be issued later Wednesday.

Officials had earlier said the evacuations wouldn't start until Thursday.

“This is our fourth storm but this one is really aggressive,” Irene Toner, director of emergency management for the county that encompasses the islands, told local radio. “This one we are taking seriously. The damage is going to be substantial.”

The Keys are connected to mainland Florida by a single road.

The storm was expected to come ashore in southwestern Florida, threatening coastal areas like Punta Gorda that were hit by Charley, a Category 4 storm that was the first of seven hurricanes to strike or pass close to the state since August 2004.

Cobb said Wilma was expected to move across Florida quickly, which means it wouldn’t weaken much over land. That means it’s possible Atlantic coast cities such as Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach could be hit by winds nearly as strong as the west coast.

The storm gathered force rapidly over the last day. It was only Tuesday morning that Wilma grew from a tropical storm into a weak hurricane.

At 11 a.m. ET, the hurricane was centered about 325 miles southeast of Cozumel, Mexico. Maximum sustained wind was 175 mph, forecasters said. The storm is moving to the west-northwest at about 7 mph.

Wilma was still more than 500 miles south of Key West, but is expected to eventually make a sharp right turn toward Florida and pick up speed in the Gulf of Mexico because it will get caught in the westerlies, the strong wind current that generally blows toward the east, forecasters said.

Wilma’s track could take it near Punta Gorda on Florida’s southwestern Gulf Coast and other areas in the state hit by Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 storm, in August 2004.

The state has seen seven hurricanes hit or pass close by since August 2004, causing more than $20 billion in estimated damage and killing nearly 150 people.

Katrina, Rita areas should be safe
Forecasters said Wilma should avoid the central U.S. Gulf coast devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita earlier this year which killed more than 1,200 people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

“There’s no scenario now that takes it toward Louisiana or Mississippi, but that could change,” Mayfield said Tuesday.

The storm is the record-tying 12th hurricane of the season, the same number reached in 1969. That is the most for one season since record-keeping began in 1851.

On Monday, Wilma became the Atlantic hurricane season’s 21st named storm, tying the record set in 1933 and exhausting the list of names for this year.

The six-month hurricane season does not end until Nov. 30. Any new storms would be named with letters from the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpha.

Four Atlantic storms — Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma — have formed this month, double the October average of two storms. The October record is six storms, for which October 1950 and 1887 share the title. **


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9710472/page/2/


**Article edited due to length.

[Sean]

I was just looking at some Satellite images of Wilma. This Hurricane is huge!

[Sean]

Wilma has become the largest hurricane of record.

Just BTW, The next one will be called Alpha! Yikes!

[Illyria]

Wilma has become the largest hurricane of record.

Just BTW, The next one will be called Alpha! Yikes!


Kind of Ironic.. not because of "our" Alpha, but the meaning of the word.

[Illyria]

Where is Wilma Heading... (http://home.accuweather.com/index.asp?partner=accuweather)

[Illyria]

Varying Wilma Models Confound Forecasters


MIAMI -- In the time Max Mayfield has been at the National Hurricane Center, the forecasting of killer storms has gone from flying kites to satellites and computer models to help pinpoint the ferocity and landfall of storms. But Wilma has confounded the experts.

Simply put, models take information from satellites, aircraft flights, ships, buoys, water temperatures, winds at different levels and other sources to try to determine where a hurricane will go and how strong it will get.

Using those models, forecasters predicted Wilma would meander a few days in the Gulf of Mexico and then race across southwest Florida or the Keys. Its slow speed has somewhat confounded them. While forecasters believe Wilma will be picked up by the jet stream and zoom across Florida, it hasn't happened as quickly as the models have predicted.

"It's going to take a little patience," Mayfield said.

Mayfield said one of the models used for Wilma has been a "windshield wiper," widely varying each time it was been used. In some computer runs, it showed Wilma off the coast of Maine after five days. In others, the same model showed the storm off the coast of Cuba.

When the models agree, it is simple for forecasters to determine the path and speed of a hurricane. When the models disagree, forecasters often use a consensus to determine what they believe is the correct path and speed of a hurricane, Mayfield said.

John Celenza, director of weather technology for The Weather Underground, a private weather company in San Francisco, said his company is having the same trouble predicting Wilma as the Hurricane Center.

"We're all the same boat," he said. "It's really up in the air right now."

Celenza noted that a small change in the data put into a model can make a huge change in the forecast.

"What the model is doing is responding to something in the atmosphere," he said. "The models are very important," he said.

The models look like an alphabet soup of letters, such as GFDL, NOGAPS, and UMET.

NOGAPS is the U.S. Navy's forecast model; UKMET is the global forecast model run by the UK Meteorological Office; the GFDL is a model developed specifically for hurricane prediction by a lab at Princeton, N.J.

But experience has proved hurricanes can be unpredictable.

Last year, Hurricane Charley's 145-mph force took forecasters by surprise and showed just how shaky a science it still is to predict a storm's intensity.

Charley quickly grew from a Category 2 to a Category 4 storm and its course took a sharp turn to the right, which put it some 70 miles south of the originally projected bull's-eye.

With so much media focus on Tampa and St. Petersburg, many residents in and around Punta Gorda were caught unprepared for the Aug. 13 hurricane. That hurricane left at least 13 people dead in its wake, which might not have been nearly as big if the storm had stuck to its original path and struck the big evacuated cities farther up the coast.

LINK (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102101725_pf.html)

[Alger]

I heard a bunch of Florida residents on the news who weren't about to be forced out of their homes by a hurricane. That's a good thing I think. :D

[Topper]

I'm amazed by Wilma's track ... she almost stalls out over Cancun before whipping
thru Florida in record speed. How many other hurricanes has NOAA recorded doing
that?