Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Tropical Update: New Tropical Storm Iselle

Hey gang...we had a new tropical storm spin up pretty fast this morning...basically it jumped from a tropical wave (which is usually a concentrated area of thunderstorms and weather disturbances) to Tropical Storm Iselle with winds already above the 35-knot range in just a handful of hours.


Currently she is about 600 miles SSE of the Tip of Baja moving WNW around 7-9 knots. Forecasts have her strengthening over the next couple of days...possibly becoming a very strong tropical storm or even a weak hurricane.

You can see on the NRL Satellite picture she is already starting to show some signs of convection and rotation both in the upper and lower levels of the storm.




From a swell perspective this storm is already in the Tip of Baja swell window and should be generating waves for those exposed breaks. Based on today's forecast I would expect new tropical SE-SSE swell to begin slowly building on Friday, likely peaking overnight into Saturday with surf in the chest-shoulder high range...and maybe bigger if she gets more intense or slows down in her movement a bit more.

She isn't as well positioned for SoCal though. At her current rate Iselle has about 30 hours of traveling before she reaches the SoCal swell window and there is still a lot of things that need to come together for us to get swell from Iselle...

If I were overly optimistic, (which I am not at this time), based on today's forecasts I would be on the lookout for new tropical SE swell to show at the exposed spots of mostly Orange County, late on Sunday and into Monday. In reality I think that we have about a 50/50 shot of SoCal getting much surf from Iselle...cross your fingers...maybe we will get lucky and she can hit our window with a halfway decent storm track and lots of power.

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