You may have hurricane fatigue, but nature, she doesn’t care. Two more waves of low pressure coming off the warm ivory coast of Africa into the tropical Atlantic earlier this month have given rise to two new Cape Verde style storms. One of them, Maria, virtually exploded yesterday, racing up the Saffir-Simpson wind scale from a relatively mild category 1 to a catastrophic category 5, when it moved over a warm basin of ocean water and then crippled the island of Dominca. From the 11 AM EDT update out of the National Hurricane Center, Maria remains a category 5 storm with max sustained winds of 160 MPH bearing North by Northwest.
The current predicted track would take Maria right over Puerto Rico, east to west, with the eye passing over higher ground. But even if the modest Cordillera mountains throw some sand into the storm’s central engine, the projected path then quickly takes it right back out over calm water stewing under the late summer sun. Excellent conditions to rebuild and sustain a major hurricane as it rambles around a constellation of islands dotting the region, including several that already got razed to the ground by Irma.
After that, well, the good news is that Maria is expected to bear to the north more than Irma did. It could well follow in Jose’s footsteps, weakening as it moves into cooler mid-Atlantic water, at most posing a temporary hazard to shipping and air travel. But if it were to jog a little more to the west, Maria might graze a big stretch of the heavily populated eastern seaboard. And for now there’s enough uncertainty in the forecasts that landfall in the continental US can’t be ruled out. Better tracking images below the fold.
Climate scientists and storm meteorologists have been sounding the alarm for decades and we are seeing the pattern they foretold. Tropical depressions steered across the Atlantic by the trade winds, or homegrown on the spot, organize rapidly, drift over calm, tepid seas that get warmer year after year, and then undergo impressive bursts in intensification with little warning. We saw this pattern start setting up in the devastating 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, typhoons in the Pacific followed suit in the years after, and now we’re seeing the same pattern again in the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
Regardless if Maria hits the US (mainland) or not, it’s simply a matter of time before her future siblings come ashore at full strength and wreak havoc on vulnerable population centers like Houston, New Orleans, Miami, and Washington, DC. Maybe the latter will finally rip off the blinders-of-denial worn so proudly by the usual suspects.