Wilma’s winds jumped 175 km/h in just 24 hours, achieving Category 5 strength with maximum winds of about 300 km/h and a minimum central pressure of 882 mb on the ocean surface-about 130 mb lower than you’d expect to see on a ‘normal’ and calm day. Hurricane Wilma grew into the most intense hurricane ever recorded in terms of air pressure when it rapidly intensified in the western Caribbean in October 2005. Plenty of other hurricanes have intensified at mind-boggling speeds. Hurricane Patricia’s rapid intensification of 195 km/h was the all-time record for a tropical system in the eastern Pacific or Atlantic basin during the modern era, according to the NHC’s analysis of the storm’s history. When rapid intensification happens, though, look out. It’s rare for a system to get its act together so quickly that its winds strengthen that much in a single day. National Hurricane Center (NHC) puts the threshold for rapid intensification when a storm’s maximum winds jump about 55 km/h in 24 hours. Sea surface temperatures near 30☌ supported the rapid intensification of Hurricane Jova in the eastern Pacific and Hurricane Lee in the Atlantic within days of one another in September 2023.īut every once in a while, we’ll see all the ingredients line up perfectly to allow a tropical cyclone to rapidly intensify in a matter of hours instead of days. That’s why most of the systems we see in an average season are only short-lived tropical depressions or tropical storms.Įven when conditions are favourable, the evolution from tropical depression to tropical storm, then tropical storm to hurricane, and finally hurricane to major hurricane, typically takes up to a week as the storm struggles to put itself together. Ingredients are rarely perfect for a tropical system to develop. Rapid intensification created some of history’s worst storms A lower air pressure creates stronger winds that maintain those thunderstorms, allowing the entire system to grow and intensify. This process acts like an efficient feedback cycle by lowering the air pressure at the centre of the tropical cyclone. Winds swirling around the newly formed low-pressure centre help organize the thunderstorms into a dense core, working in unison to inhale vast amounts of unstable air from the surface. Updrafts feeding energy into these thunderstorms pull massive amounts of unstable air up and away from the surface, leaving behind a void of less air-and lower air pressure-in their wake. Hurricane Lee as a Category 4 storm on September 7, 2023. STAY SAFE: What you need in your hurricane preparedness kit If there’s low wind shear, ample moisture, and toasty sea surface temperatures, a scrappy bunch of thunderstorms can persist for hours and even days at a time. These thunderstorms pull warm, humid air up from the surface in order to grow and thrive. Hurricanes are fragile, frightening enginesĮven the strongest hurricane begins its life as a tiny cluster of thunderstorms. Patricia is one of dozens of storms that took advantage of favourable conditions to rapidly intensify at horrifying speed-many of them as they closed in on landfall. Rapid intensification is a remarkable process that can make a storm far stronger than anyone anticipated. Hurricane Hunters flying through the storm the following morning found that it had grown even stronger to pack maximum sustained winds of 340 km/h, making it the strongest hurricane ever recorded near North America, more than doubling its maximum winds in just 24 hours. Just 12 hours later, Patricia had exploded into a scale-topping Category 5 with maximum winds of 275 km/h.ĭON’T MISS: How hot water fuels the world’s most powerful hurricanes Hurricane Patricia grew into one of the most intense storms ever recorded as it swirled into western Mexico, and it achieved this feat in just 24 short hours.Ĭoastal residents woke up on October 22, 2015, to find Hurricane Patricia a few hundred kilometres offshore as a budding Category 1 with maximum winds of 165 km/h.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |