I suppose I need to preface with the fact that Houston is one of the most hurricane vulnerable cities in the country despite its city limits being inland. The whole reason Houston grew up where is did was the 1902 Galveston hurricane the deadliest in US history destroying the Manhattan of the South. Houston’s vulnerability is spelled out in its name the bayou city as the estuaries are vulnerable to both surge and flooding though not the wipe the slab clean surge on the barrier islands or direct coast.
An unusually bad cat 1 is a good way to describe the storm. Having been a cat 4 that made landfall and or previously interacted with terrain several times before the storm structure was still intact albeit greatly diminished. That along with the track through the Bay of Campeche an extremely warm body of water makes for easier reintensification along with allowing for a better system structure. The more organized the structure the means more developed feeder bands and inner and outer eyewall. Leading to a larger area being effected by strong winds in the most intense squalls.
Further more the northerly track brought the right front quadrant the most dangerous part of the system with the strongest and most prolonged winds into Houston. The angle of impact further exacerbated the flooding situation due to the local and regional geography pushing surge in the worst possible direction for water to continuously pile up. Hurricane Sandy while a warm core hybrid can be an analogous situation in terms of angle of impact, geography & prior high intensity leading to a severe cat 1. Though Sandy was a different animal there are parallels that can be drawn, at least in understanding how impacts don’t always correlate to intensity ratings.
Climate change and the sudden onset of a strong La Niña seems to be pro-Atlantic this time strangely in terms of effecting Hurricane development. The eastern pacific usually has a much more active hurricane season during normal La Niña the quick switch from El Niño seems to have thrown basic climate models into chaos. Hurricane Hillary was only able to get a chance to make a run at So Cal due to the extremely powerful La Niña of summer 2023. We’re in an insane situation flipping back and forth from La Niña in summer to El Niño in winter back to La Niña it’s completely breaking the most fundamental rules of known meteorology on a global scale.
The massive prolonged extreme western heatwave likely is a result of a lack of hurricane activity in the eastern pacific in a La Niña set up. It’s certainly delayed the monsoon though the kind of heatwave being experienced in the west right now is downright scary for its intensity and scope. With very few exceptions such as San Francisco city limits the entire area west of the a line up to the Wasatch Mountains is under excessive heat warnings including 100+ on the pacific coast in Northern California, above 100 in Portland and near 100 in Seattle with even the Olympic Peninsula in the high 80’s.
The East Pac is experiencing much warmer than usual water temperatures. What that means is anyone’s guess could have another bomb Hurricane like the cat 5 the devastated Acapulco with no warning, going from a storm to a cat 5 in 24 hours. Could have another Hurricane Hilary make a run at So Cal or the hurricane season could be quiet killing the monsoon and restarting the path to mega drought just as we are seeing an end to short term effects of the drought. That would likely lead to an epic fire season as the vegetation has had several good to record seasons of precipitation leading to explosion in brush growth.
Annoyingly there isn’t a color code to temps anymore (thanks Weather Channel & boss for runing my alternative site)
Deep dark reds are 90’s, Normal red are 80’s, Orange are 70’s yellow, are 60’s tan-grey are 50’s, violet-blue are 40’s, blue are 30’s, and light silvery blue is the freezing point and below. Hurricanes need ~78 degrees to form and maintain intensity.
(You can see heat from the land being blown over the very edge of the coast if you look carefully in the US Pacific throwing off the satellite readings & computer modeling)
https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane?index_region=ep
Interactive current US severe weather map
https://www.wunderground.com/wunderm...&surge=0&tor=0
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