bluewave

Congrats!

It's a 40 mile punchhole type eye following the disruption going over Puerto Rico yesterday. Although the large, 40 n mi diameter, eye of the hurricane is still a little ragged-looking, it is gradually becoming better defined, and a ring of cold cloud tops is intensifying around the eye.

That is one of the biggest eyes in the Atlantic since Isabel.

The coolest part of the 12z Euro run is when Maria absorbs a leftover lobe of Jose vorticity just like Jose did with Irma last week.

Unfortunately, the aerial views look like Homestead after Andrew. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/dominica-pictures-show-total-destruction-after-hurricane-maria-n802931

In Guayama, on Puerto Rico's southern coast, video clips posted on social media showed a street turned into a river of muddy floodwaters. In the community of Juan Matos, located in Cataño, west of San Juan, 80 percent of the structures were destroyed, the mayor of Cataño told El Nuevo Dia, and half of the municipal employees lost their homes. "The area is completely flooded. Water got into the houses. The houses have no roof. Most of them are made of wood and zinc, and electric poles fell on them," the mayor told the publication. In the capital of San Juan, buildings shook and glass windows shattered from the force of the storm. Residents of some high-rise apartments sought refuge in bathrooms and first-floor lobbies, but even those who sought out safe ground found themselves vulnerable. Buildings that meet the island's newer construction codes, established around 2011, should be able to weather the winds, Rosselló said. But wooden homes in flood-prone areas "have no chance," he predicted. Macarena Gil Gandia, a resident of Hato Rey, a business district in San Juan, helped her mother clean out water that had started flooding the kitchen of her second-floor apartment at dawn. "There are sounds coming from all sides," Gil Gandia said in a text message. "The building is moving! And we're only on the second floor, imagine the rest!" Parts of Hato Rey were underwater. An electric gate for her building in the neighborhood was blown off, Gil Gandia said. In the lobby of Ciqala Luxury Home Suites in Miramar, a neighborhood in San Juan, Maria Gil de Lamadrid waited with her husband in the lobby as the rain and wind pounded on the hotel's facade. The door of the hotel's parking garage flopped violently in the wind. The sounds of the storm were so loud that it was hard for hotel guests to hear each other speak. Gil de Lamadrid spent the night in the hotel after evacuating her nearby 16th floor waterfront apartment, which has been prone to flooding during previous hurricanes. But even in a luxury hotel room, Gil de Lamadrid could not evade flooding; on Wednesday morning, inches of water began to seep into her hotel room through the balcony doors. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/20/hurricane-maria-takes-aim-at-puerto-rico-with-force-not-seen-in-modern-history/?utm_term=.13ca24280b97

Gusting to 112 mph at Arecibo with the surge coming up. https://tidesonline.nos.noaa.gov/

Getting some photos now from the Olive Boutique hotel in San Juan. https://mobile.twitter.com/briggsoto/status/910473832359657472?p=v

Several rivers are already near record flood stage.

The 113 mph gust was the last report out of San Juan. A sustained wind of 64 mph (104 km/h) with a gust to 113 mph (182 km/h) was recently reported at San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Gusting to 109 with a 6 ft surge a at Yabucoa on the SE coast.

San Juan airport stopped reporting a few hours ago when the wind gusts reached 91 mph.

This is the realistic worst track since its very unlikely that that a major would hit there from the NE.

For those that didn't get a chance to read the story. http://mashable.com/2017/03/10/hurricane-forecasts-suffer-gfs-model-upgrade/

That's also a very unusual portion of the Atlantic Basin to see a cat 5 hurricane. Two in under a month is off the charts.

Unprecedented hurricane activity for under a month and an entire hurricane season for that region around the Hebert Box.

Maria is looking like potentially the strongest hurricane landfall in Puerto Rico of the satellite era. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/International_Hurricanes.html #Maria could be only the 4th category 4 #hurricane landfall on Puerto Rico since 1851- last one was in 1932- the notorious San Ciprian stormpic.twitter.com/6LHywya9hH 8:14 AM - 18 Sep 2017

Still looks like the paper is behind a paywall. But phys.org posted some of the key findings. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-eastern-arctic-ocean-atlantification.html (Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has found that the eastern part of the Arctic Ocean is undergoing what they describe as "Atlantification"—in which the ocean is becoming more like the Atlantic Ocean. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they tracked ocean temperatures over a 15-year period and the changes they found. The Arctic Ocean has traditionally been different from the Atlantic or Pacific in a fundamental way—the water gets warmer as you go deeper (due to inflows from the Atlantic) rather than the other way around, as happens with the other two. But now, the researchers with this new effort have found that may be changing. They have been using tethered moorings to record ocean temperatures at different depths for approximately 15 years and have found that changes have taken place—sea ice is melting from below, not just from above due to warmer air temperatures. In studying the data from the moorings, the researchers found that warm water from the Atlantic, which has traditionally been separated from melting ice because of the halocline layer—a barrier that exists between deep salty water and fresher water closer to the surface—has been penetrating the barrier, allowing ice to melt from below. It has also led to the water becoming less stratified, like the Atlantic. They describe the changes as a "massive shift" in the ocean that has occurred over an extremely short time frame. These new findings may explain why the extent of ice coverage has been shrinking so dramatically—at a rate of 13 percent per decade. The result, the researchers report, is a feedback loop—as more ice melts due to warmer air, more vertical mixing occurs, allowing warmer water to move upwards, which causes melting from below. They also acknowledge that it is not yet clear what impact the change might have, but suggest it is likely to be substantial—from the biogeochemical to geophysical levels, basic components of the ocean will likely be altered, causing changes such as phytoplankton blooms in places where they have never been seen before. They also note that there is another factor to consider—the massive amounts of fresh water pouring into the ocean from rivers in Siberia as permafrost thaws.

Just a remarkable amount of intensity and activity in such a short time there. Almost like we are seeing some type of rebound effect after years of of dry air and suppression in that region. So we swing from one extreme to the other.

Gives new meaning to heavy wet snow. 0810 AM HEAVY SNOW 2 SE MONTANA CITY 46.52N 111.90W 09/16/2017 M15.0 INCH JEFFERSON MT TRAINED SPOTTER POWER IS OUT. LOST PART OF CHERRY TREE DO TO THE WEIGHT OF THE SNOW. 2.21 INCHES OF LIQUID EQUIVALENT

Looks like the first time in the satellite era that 3 hurricanes as intense as Irma, Jose, and Maria passed through the Hebert Box #1 in one month or a complete season. http://climate.ncsu.edu/climateblog?id=91

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0693.1 Extreme warming in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea during the winter period 2000 to 2016 Abstract The regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM) is used with a high resolution of 15 km for the entire Arctic for all winters 2002/2003-2014/2015. The simulations show a high spatial and temporal variability of the recent 2-m air temperature increase in the Arctic. The maximum warming occurs north of Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea between March 2003-2012 and is responsible for up to 20°C increase. Land-based observations confirm the increase but do not cover the maximum regions that are located over the ocean and sea-ice. Also the 30 km version of the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) is used to verify the CCLM for the overlapping time period 2002/2003-2011/2012. The differences between CCLM and ASR 2-m air temperatures vary slightly within 1°C for the ocean and sea-ice area. Thus, ASR captures the extreme warming as well. The monthly 2-m air temperatures of observations and ERA-Interim reanalyses show a large variability for the winters 1979-2016. Nevertheless, the air temperature rise since the beginning of the 21st century is up to eight times higher than in the decades before. The sea-ice decrease is identified as the likely reason for the warming. The vertical temperature profiles show that the warming has a maximum near the surface, but a 0.5°Cyr−1increase is found up to 2 km. CCLM, ASR and also the coarser resolved ERA-Interim Reanalysis show that February and March are the months with the highest 2-m air temperature increases, averaged over the ocean and sea-ice area north of 70°N; for CCLM the warming amounts to an average of almost 5°C for 2002/2003-2011/2012.

I am beginning to think that the key number for Arctic amplification was dropping below 6 million sq km. Crossing the technically ice free mark below 1 million sq km sometime in the future may not even be that significant an event.

It would probably take an extraordinary circumstance to ever see a September minimum extent above 6 million sq km after the damage that was done to the ice during the 2007-2012 era.