gallopinggertie

Hone is forecast to pass within about 50 miles of the Big Island as a 65 mph tropical storm. I think this is the closest brush Hawaii has had with a storm this strong since Iselle, which made landfall on the big island ten years ago.

Shanshan only forecast to be cat 2 at landfall now. Still shown as a typhoon over the Sea of Japan though which is quite rare.

I found a map showing SSTs are 28-30 C over that part of the Pacific. Seems plenty warm though I’m not sure about shear. https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/ Shanshan is forecast to still be a 70 mph tropical storm when it reaches Hokkaido, which is unusually strong for that far north. I wonder if it will be extratropical by then.

Typhoon Shanshan is looking pretty serious for Japan. It’s now forecast to make landfall as a strong Cat 3 or low-end 4 equivalent near Nagoya.

Looks like a typical situation for Hawaii, with one storm passing well to the south of the islands followed by another storm weakening greatly as it approaches from the east. It’s amazing how well-defended Hawaii is from hurricanes.

Tropical storm Shanshan is currently forecast to make landfall on southern Honshu as a 120mph typhoon. Major hurricane-equivalent strikes on Japan are not that common.

Any thoughts on invests 90/91 in the Central Pacific? NHC has them up to 90% and it looks like any storm that forms will track close to Hawaii.

Debby is projected to make landfall near St. Marks. Judging from Google Earth, this is an even less populated part of the Big Bend than where Idalia made landfall last year (near the town of Perry), so that’s good news.

It’s official: Portland, Oregon saw their hottest July on record this year. Average temperature was 74.7, 4.5 degrees above average. The second hottest July was 74.1 degrees in 1985, so it was by a significant margin. August 2023 was the hottest month of all-time. Climate change is really setting in here… ETA: Portland hasn’t really experienced rapid growth over the past few decades (compared to Las Vegas, say), so blaming this on urban heat island would be a stretch.

It has been hot in the Pacific Northwest, too. Here in Portland, Oregon, July has averaged 75.2 degrees so far which is 5.4 degrees above normal. There were three straight days of 100-plus highs earlier this month. Portland and Seattle both have Csb climates, aka warm-summer Mediterranean. But Portland’s current hottest average month, July, is only a couple degrees from crossing the 72-degree threshold that would push it to Csa, aka hot-summer Mediterranean. At this rate, Portland will probably be Csa in a couple decades, and Seattle might follow around 2070 or something. Though it’s hard to imagine, many climate models forecast huge shifts in these climate zones. In 2100 Chicago may be Cfa (“humid subtropical”, though it would still have chilly winters, just much less cold than now), and warm-summer continental climates (Dfb) will likely displace subarctic climates throughout much of Canada.

Okay but human agriculture has only been around during a very narrow range of global average temperature, which is much cooler than the vast majority of those 65 million years without reaching the coldest extremes of the current Ice Age. I don't think we want to see how our civilization would do at Eocene-like temperatures. And on top of that, it's the rapidity of the change that's so troubling. It would be much easier to cope with a ten foot sea level rise over 2,000 years than over 200 years. Not making any specific predictions here, just giving an example. Humans are adaptable, but we have our limits.

Storm Daniel formed over the Ionian Sea and moved over the Balkan Peninsula as an extratropical storm before moving southeast over the Mediterranean, acquiring tropical characteristics, and making landfall yesterday near Benghazi, Libya, as a tropical storm, according to Wikipedia. Daniel is an example of a medicane--a storm in the Mediterranean Sea with subtropical or tropical traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Daniel#/media/File:Daniel_2023-09-09_1200Z.jpg It looks like Daniel had deep convection before making landfall. SST's near the coast of Libya are pretty high now, at around 27 degrees Celsius: http://www.ceam.es/ceamet/SST/index.html Daniel caused terrible damage in Libya upon making landfall. Yet the NHC doesn't track storms in the Mediterranean, and I'm not aware of any other tropical agency that does. Was Daniel really tropical? Should the NHC issue advisories for storms in the Mediterranean? This is a sea that is mostly enclosed by land, mostly isolated from the rest of the Atlantic Ocean, and yet still technically part of that ocean.