Atlantic Doomwatch: Revenge of the Blobs

TL;DR: Kong Rey hit Taiwan and is now brushing the mainland provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang as a much diminished tropical storm. NHC is starting the last month* of hurricane season with disturbances.

Kong Rey crossed Taiwan as a rather large category three storm (on the Saffir Simpson scale, which generally isn’t used in the Pacific but people in the U.S. know it for comparison). Taiwan is well prepared for such events, with a good civil defense system, nevertheless there have been at least two deaths and over 500 injuries as well as damage across the island.

The storm is causing some disruption across the mainland today, and will brush the southern islands of Japan tomorrow as a tropical storm.

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NHC has three disturbances tagged in this morning’s Tropical Weather Outlook, here on top of the GOES East water vapor band:

The 6.9 micron band is known as the mid level water vapor band. It lets us look at the moisture in the middle levels of the atmosphere that are important for storm development. You can clearly see the cold front moving through the eastern US in darker blue shades, as well as the dry are ahead of it in red that gave much of GA and FL clear skies for Halloween.

The modeling for disturbance “1” (it is not yet an invest area) are not consistent. The 00z storm shows scattered low pressure centers, whereas the just-finished (7am ET) 06z run shows two mature storms, one entering the Gulf a week from today. Here are the two runs using the fancy slider comparison thingee:

There are no “magic words” in the advisories, but NHC does warn both of the systems can cause locally heavy rainfall. Folks in the northern Caribbean should keep an eye on that, but at this point nothing to worry about in the mainland US.

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* Hurricane season technically runs from 1 June to 30 November in the Atlantic, but there have been storms in every month of the year so keep that in mind!

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I no longer get funding for hurricane and geophysical hazard work, and am deciding how to continue the blog, potentially expanding the commentary to non-tropical weather hazards, or discontinue it entirely since it’s a bit of a distraction from my funded areas (and it’s a lot of work, and requires maintaining a lot of equipment). In some part that depends on the level of contributions to keep it going, and as long time readers know I’m reluctant to fund-raise during live events of the aftermath when people are suffering, I am putting this link in today as a test to see if any new contributors or subscribers will show up (click here for donation/subscription page) …