As anticipated NHC has radically revised the track over the last 18 hours, and now shows Rafael taking a hard turn to the left away from the US Mainland …
Here are NHC’s Key Messages regarding Hurricane Rafael (en Español: Mensajes Claves). The impact estimate using my TAOS(tm) TC model using their track now looks like this:
Rafael was a strong but compact storm as it crossed Cuba last night, passing just west of Havana. The power grid for the entire country is down this morning, we will have to wait for sunrise to get a damage estimate but it looks like it may have had out sized impacts. It’s hard to compute economic equivalents between radically different economies like the US and Cuba, but while the real dollar impacts are on the order of $600 Million USD and seems small by the numbers we are used to seeing for a US landfall, that would be as if a $172 Billion event hit the US (think Katrina or Sandy scale).
There has been some electrons spilled over the fact Rafael caused some of the offshore oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico OCS to be shut in. This should mainly be a wave event, and well within the design tolerances of the offshore infrastructure so that, combined with the fact the Gulf isn’t as important a source of oil as it used to be, shouldn’t have more than a transient impact. Still, gives the traders something to talk and speculate about.
Typhoon Yinxing (Marce in the Philippines) is slowly skirting the north coast of Luzon this morning. It’s a monster …
The Philippines has been hit be no less than 13 storms this year! The rain from Yinxing is caused more misery in the form of flash floods and mudslides all across the northern regions, coming on the heels of Typhoon Trami that has already killed over 150 and damaging a lot of agriculture and infrastructure. Yinxing looks to make a sharp turn to the south avoiding China and then fade out over the South China Sea off of Vietnam.
