Oscar remains a very small storm – the core hurricane force winds is only 5 nautical miles in radius, which is less than 1/3 of the radius of maximum winds seen in a hurricane. The radius to the environment – the maximum distance of any significant influence of the storm – is probably only 80 miles (typically a hurricane RENV is two or three times that much). Here is this morning’s IR animation loop showing cloud top temperatures. The colder the temperature, the stronger the convection, and you can see the areas of pink appear and disappear in the core of the storm, with a bit of an explosion of pink just as it hits Grand Inagua Island :
Here are NHC’s Key Messages regarding Hurricane Oscar (en Español: Mensajes Claves). There are warnings up for Cuba, Turks and Caicos, and the southern Bahamas:
The current NHC forecast (processed with my TAOS(tm) model to get potential impacts) looks like this:
The track forecast isn’t terribly difficult, although the track map with all the ensemble runs (gray lines) looks a bit busy:
Short term the storm seems certain to hit Cuba just as it slows down to turn. The high mountainous ridges should quickly tear apart the small storm. Note the smaller storm means more of the circulation is over land, meaning terrain and being cut off from water weakens it rapidly. Just the opposite of Helene, where the large size and fast movement meant the mountains enhanced the damage).
Longer term there are two scenarios: first, the one NHC favors, is that the cold front sweeping through the region picks up Oscar and turns it northwest back across the Bahamas. That should cause whatever is left after Cuba gets through with it to rapidly weaken and merge with the front. The second is that Oscar is torn completely apart by Cuba, and the remnants scatter. We’ll just have to see what happens. In either event, the storm should just be a rain event at that point.
Nadine is a fading tropical depression this morning, raining out over southern Mexico today, causing some flash flooding. Interestingly, the remnants are expected to enter the East Pacific (off the west coast of Mexico) and regenerate. It will get a new name if that happens, which seems likely – 90% in the latest NHC advisory.
How late into fall do you think we will have a major storm? My concern is the warm temperature of the Gulf ? As I remember we still had some warm Halloween nights, I used that as a marker for many years to donate my Hurricane supplies each year in Florida . This year I will donate to Enki. Really enjoy learning on this site.