9-10-18

Hurricane Florence is expected to strengthen as it approaches the coast of South and North Carolina, possibly becoming a Category 5 storm Tuesday (Sept. 11), according to the National Hurricane Center.

It is expected to catastrophically impact the Carolinas through to Virginia. Over a million currently evacuated with many more mandatory evacuations come Tuesday! Please pray!

Hurricane Florence Strengthening to Cat 5

BP Earthwatch

NEW – Hurricane Florence to be CAT 5 – NHC

MrMBB333

Hurricane Florence could become a Category 5 monster before reaching Carolinas

Updated 3:52 PM; Posted 3:52 PM

Hurricane Florence is expected to strengthen as it approaches the coast of South and North Carolina, possibly becoming a Category 5 storm Tuesday (Sept. 11), according to the National Hurricane Center.

As of 4 p.m. Monday, the storm’s center was 525 miles southeast of Bermuda and 1,170 miles from Cape Fear, N.C., moving at 13 mph with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph. Category 5 hurricanes have sustained winds of at least 157 mph.

The Atlantic Ocean has produced only three Category 5 hurricanes in the last decade — Irma and Maria in 2017 and Matthew in 2016.

Forecasters expect Florence to strengthen over the next 36 hours, but exact movements and intensity remains subject to change. 

“The bottom line is that there is high confidence that Florence will be a large and extremely dangerous hurricane, regardless of its exact intensity,” said Forecaster Eric Blake. 

Life-threatening storm surge and damaging winds are likely along portions of the coastlines of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Meanwhile, freshwater flooding may occur in inland areas due to excessive rainfall caused when Florence likely slows down once making landfall.

National Hurricane Center✔@NHC_Atlantic

Hurricane #Florence is not just a threat to the coast. Very heavy, prolonged rainfall is expected over a large portion of the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic. Here is the latest 7 day rainfall forecast from @NWSWPC.

3:26 PM – Sep 10, 2018

National Hurricane Center✔@NHC_Atlantic

NEW: Florence is now a category 4 hurricane. Data from a NOAA Hurricane Hunter indicate that Florence has continued to rapidly strengthen and has maximum sustained winds near 130 mph (195 km/h) and a minimum central pressure of 946 mb (27.93 inches) http://hurricanes.gov 

10:02 AM – Sep 10, 2018

Why wasn’t Isaac retired as a hurricane name? It’s on a new storm in the Atlantic again

Updated 3:33 PM; Posted 3:11 PM

Homes in Braithwaite, Louisiana, bottom, full of water three days after Hurricane Isaac hit the New Orleans-area Friday, August 31, 2012. The New Orleans skyline can be seen on the horizon. (Photo by Chris Granger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

Hurricane season in Louisiana is usually shot through with deja vu, but at least one of the named storms making its way through the Atlantic Ocean right now has an especially familiar ring to it.

As of Monday afternoon (Sept. 10), Hurricane Isaac was a Category 1 storm in the central Atlantic Ocean, expected to make its way toward the Caribbean by Thursday. Isaac was upgraded on Sunday, making it the fifth hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic season — and one of four tropical systems forecasters were tracking Monday.

The South Carolina governor ordered the state’s entire coastline to be evacuated starting at noon Tuesday.

It is also — as many in the New Orleans area are keenly aware — the second hurricane to bear the name Isaac in the past decade.

For most in south Louisiana, the name Isaac brings us back to Aug. 28, 2012, when a minimal, but deadly hurricane by the same name made two landfalls in the state. That Isaac, a slow-moving storm that peaked at Category 1 strength, led to 41 deaths, including 24 in Haiti, and caused an estimated $3.1 billion in damage. Floodwaters rose and swept into homes in subdivisions in LaPlace, Slidell, Madisonville and the lower West Bank. Neighborhoods across greater New Orleans spent days without electricity thanks to downed trees and power lines. It took more than a week to get electricity back in some areas.

There was also a Hurricane Isaac in 2000, though it tracked through the Atlantic Ocean and never affected land.

So, why is Isaac back as a storm name? Shouldn’t it have been retired?

The short answer is that experts didn’t think 2012′s Isaac was devastating enough to justify removing it from the rotation of future hurricane names. A better understanding of why that is starts with an explanation of how hurricanes get their names in the first place.

The National Hurricane Center started naming storms in 1953 under the guidance and oversight of the World Meteorological Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates with countries worldwide on assessing and understanding the Earth’s atmosphere and the weather and climate it produces.

The WMO also lays out strict rules for selecting storm names, which, in the case of Atlantic hurricanes, consists of six separate lists of male and female names used on a six-year rotation. A regional hurricane committee with representatives from more than 25 nations, including the United States, determines whether to retire certain names from the list for Atlantic Ocean storms.

French Quarter humor as Hurricane Isaac approached New Orleans, Tuesday Aug. 28, 2012.

Names are only retired “if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate,” according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration website.

For that reason, there will never be another Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 led to 1,836 deaths in the U.S., mostly in Louisiana, caused levee failures and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, and, at $125 billion in total damage, is one of the costliest storms in history. 

Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center, said in an email that the WMO’s Region IV Hurricane Committee, the group that makes decisions on Atlantic hurricane names, met in spring 2013 to consider a range of meteorological issues, including the fate of the Isaac name. The committee included experts from more than 20 nations in the Caribbean and Latin America as well as the U.S., U.K., France and the Netherlands.

The experts determined 2012′s Isaac “was not a catastrophic storm, thus not meeting part of the criteria to retire the name,” Feltgen wrote.

Several storm names from the hyperactive 2017 hurricane season are among those that have since been retired. Those include:

• Harvey, which made landfall Aug. 25, 2017 at San Jose Island, Texas and led to catastrophic rainfall and flooding in the Houston metro area. Harvey caused 68 deaths and is tied with Katrina as a the costliest storm on record.
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• Irma, the strongest hurricane of 2017 in terms of wind speed, made landfalls in Cuba and South Florida. It caused 52 deaths and $64.7 billion in damage.
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• Maria, which strengthened to a Category 5 storm before making landfall on Dominica on Sept. 18, 2017. Maria was a Category 4 storm when it made another landfall in Puerto Rico, where it caused considerable damage. The storm led to more than 3,000 deaths and $91.6 billion in damage.
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• Nate, which hit Central America in early October 2017 before making landfall in Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Nate caused 48 deaths and $787 million in damage.

NOLA.com

#hurricaneflorence #weather #extremeweather #rain #flood #devastation

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