hlcater

Cat 4 is probably a good bet right now. Would like recon to get in there sooner rather than later, as eye is probably no wider than 6nm or so. An eye that small is not stable and I'm not confident that it maintains itself long enough should the 1730z recon plane end up getting canceled. Think it peaks sometime later today/this evening and kinda just holds steady into landfall. Whether or not this attains cat 5 to me is solely a function of how long can the pinhole remain stable?

We have Hurricane Eta on ATCF 65kt/987

530z

Looking like it’s getting ready to undergo RI. Multiple impressive bursts rotating tightly around the center. In contrast to Delta and Zeta which could seemingly only fire one burst at a time.

I can’t...

Absolute beast of a storm. Wish we had recon in a storm like that.

Big if true

Hope brandon clement is actually getting some wind/pressure data right there. In a spot such that if there were cat 3 winds in this thing, he probably would've seen them.

Most north moving gulf storms have weak/non-existent south sides. I remember when people thought Michael was remarkable because it was the exception to the rule. Not only that, take a look at environment/synoptics and a half-a-cane absolutely makes sense.

Could see this one going either way in post analysis. Lot of indicators suggestive that this may have briefly been a marginal cat 3, but nothing was overtly definitive. Pressure kept falling into landfall and bottomed out at 966. If any of this years storms were to be bumped in post, it'd be this one, pending onshore obs.

Huge fetch too on the eastern side. This is gonna be a surge problem.

Never seen asymmetry quite like this. Fascinating.

What it really needs to do is contract. A rough eye diameter is somehwhere in the ballpark of 40 miles. Pretty big...

I like the look of this one. Could make a run well into C2 status if things go well for it overnight. Actually like the vortex structure more now than I did yesterday. Seems reasonably tight and compact.

some rather glaring organizational problems here. 1) The convective bursts at present have been rather singular (as in singular updraft), asymmetric and transient. 2) These bursts are having a hard time really consolidating over the center probably because they're having trouble persisting. 3) The RMW is very broad and there isn't an inner core structure at all, despite the rather intense convective burst ongoing. 4) The large area of 50kt winds on the northern side likely indicates this storm will have trouble building an inner core in short order, at least having a hard time doing it prior to yucatan landfall. As is, I don't really see this intensifying very quickly with rather significant organizational flaws working against it. I think this makes landfall as a weak cane as it stands now. It may be a strong TS now, but it is still *very* disorganized relatively speaking. Not all 70mph TSs are created equal.

Not rapidly organizing, but on the visible loop, you can see the center consolidating a little closer to the big convective blob. Earlier today it was poorly defined and was elongated to the NW Over the past several hours, it has lost quite a bit of that elongation as pressures fall closer to the blob as evident on recon. Lots of work to do yet with it being decoupled and slightly sheared, but organization continues. in other news are there any Actually Good™ gif uploading websites? Levi's site turns out gifs that are like 25mb which greatly limits what you can do with them.

Yup that’s what I’m thinking. Would need a storm to separate itself to do much of anything and I just don’t think that happens

Conditional setup tomorrow for eastern Iowa that should deliver a nice QLCS with some locally gusty winds at a minimum. Shear is quite good and more than sufficient for a supercell/tornado threat by itself however shear vectors relative to the boundary, degree of forcing on said boundary and risk for cloud cover or a near surface inversion all suggest that risk is low if existent at all, despite the shear/instability that should be present. That said, if additional clearing is realized, there could be a brief window for something if there is a discrete storm around to tap into the 250+ 0-1km SRH/300+ 0-3km SRH. I don’t think this setup has what it takes personally but I probably still get suckered into chasing it due to the 0 minute drive to the target area. Plan would be to just find the warm front and just hope for the best

Very photogenic little system. One of my favorites this year for sure.

Very interesting to see what recon finds given satellite has only improved from earlier

I’ll keep my eye out. thanks for the heads up

My guess is that the NHC is probably underestimating the intensity currently. Satellite presentation and rather robust circulation suggest true intensity may be more like 80 to possibly 90kts. These rather warm topped/low tropopause storms seem to be prone to being underestimated in intensity like Lee and Ophelia 2017.

You're gonna get 6" out of this easy based on radar trends.