TL;DR: Rafael is now a hurricane and will make landfall today in western Cuba at near Category 3 intensity before brushing the Lower Keys with tropical storm conditions. NHC’s latest is here: Key Messages regarding Hurricane Rafael (en Español: Mensajes Claves). Typhoon Yinxing (Marce in the Philippines) is brushing the north coast of Luzon.
Rafael is now a hurricane and in favorable conditions, intensifying as it approaches Cuba. Here are the warnings as of 5am this morning:
The NHC forecast is pretty solid for the next two days, but after that there are three scenarios. Here are the major track models, along with the NHC forecast track in red:
Here I’ll say something I rarely say: the NHC track is probably wrong. But: they don’t believe it either 😛 … saying then, in effect, days 4 and 5 are basically a placeholder.
The track models are so split because some of them form a ridge that will turn the storm west and south, and some don’t. Another factor is that an increasing number of scenarios basically break up the storm (that’s scenario three: Rafael doesn’t make it as a coherent system.
Here’s a bit more on that last aspect. The Northern Hemisphere is transitioning from summer to fall, so cold fronts are moving across the country and pressing into the tropics. Sea surface temperatures are still warm in the Caribbean, but cooling as you move north. The Gulf is much cooler than it was even a month ago – still warm enough to support a hurricane, but everything else has to be favorable as well, and it isn’t. Here is what the wind shear looks like now:
In this graphic, compare the magenta arrows (low altitude winds) with blue (high altitude winds), and also note the shaded areas, that indicate how but that difference is. See the upper left corner? That’s an approaching cold front. Rafael is the low pressure system just south of Cuba (concentric circles). Here is the forecast for three days from now (Saturday):
GFS shows the front still to the north of the storm, but ECM, UK, and the regional hurricane models show it over the norther Gulf. Notice even in this GFS run the shear (shaded areas) are starting to impact the storm. So that’s a bit more of the “why” behind the forecast. My thinking is the approaching front will shred Rafael, but we will have to wait and see.
In the Pacific, Typhoon Yinxing (known as Marce in the Philippines – they use their own names) is impacting the northern Luzon and dumping significant rain and wind across the island …
Finally, it seems the U.S. elections may be resolved sooner than expected. As noted in my post from earlier this year, I know a lot of you are emotionally invested in this or that candidate and, worse, hyped up to hate this or that candidate and their supporters. I hope you will all (winners and losers) take a deep breath and realize that U.S. Elections matter, but there are a lot of checks and balances that are still operative. That’s typically good domestically, but bad in terms of foreign policy, where we are on the verge of catastrophe, the majority in both parties are neoconservatives with a highly distorted worldview, and that isn’t likely to change that much. So it is likely the horrors in Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon will continue, and the war in Ukraine will grind on to its bloody inevitable end (hopefully lower odds of a nuclear confrontation, given Trump’s history). In any event, listen to Londo …
Just remember, your the one who always gets stuck paying for the drinks.