Tropical Update - Hurricane Rick starting to slow down

Hurricane Rick is starting to weaken…oh he is still pretty intense as storms go…but he has definitely toned it down from the Category-5 nonsense that he was putting out over the weekend.

Currently Rick’s core winds are holding around 100-knots (120-mph) with gusts hitting 120-knots (144-mph).



This weakening is due to a couple of factors…namely that Rick is hitting cooler water and upper level shearing at the same time. The National Hurricane Center is estimating that the shearing is close to 15-20 knots which can destabilize a hurricane’s convection pretty quickly.

Check out the difference in the satellite photos from Saturday afternoon compared against this morning’s. You can see that Rick has lost a lot of his shape…and thanks to the increased shearing most of his NW and SW quadrants have lost their cloud shape making the storm looking increasingly asymmetrical.

Saturday Afternoon



Monday Morning



And here you can see the sea-surface temps from the CIMSS site…that 27-28 degree (Celsius) Isotherm line is generally what forecasters consider the cutoff in sea-surface-temps needed for a storm to maintain its strength.



Unfortunately from a swell-perspective this is bad news for Southern California for a couple of reasons…first is that the storm is weakening and once a tropical storm starts to weaken, particularly when it is caused by shearing, it has a tendency to lift its winds off of the surface of the ocean in fluky periods, which means that the fetch potentially setting up swell is suddenly less consistent and broken up as the storm starts to destabilize.

The other sucky part of what is happening to Rick is that this shearing (which will push him back to the east faster than the original forecasts were estimating) will keep Rick from moving deeper into the Socal swell window.



Based on the latest satellite pics…I don’t think that Rick pushed far enough into our window to generate us much surf…sure half of the storm was over that little green line…but those winds were blowing the wrong way, which does us no good.

Rick still has a little more WNW-N movement in him before he hinks back to the ENE and towards cabo…but with the storm weakening and shearing starting to pull him apart I don’t think that he is going to get much of a chance to set up swell. It probably won’t be totally flat at the SE facing spots…but any swell that makes it out of Rick will probably be fairly small (mostly below chest-shoulder high) and short-lived even at the top exposed spots.

Basically this point it looks like any energy we will see will arrive throughout the day on the 21st out of the SE (155-165) and will be mostly small, shadowed (except in a couple of areas), and will be almost completely gone by Thursday the 22nd. Fortunately there will be more long-period SW and NW swell showing around the same time so hopefully Rick will just help to enhance the surf shape/consistency at the exposed breaks.

Tropical Update – Hurricane Rick – Chewing bubblegum and kicking a$$

I think that Hurricane Rick may be all out of bubblegum…because he is becoming a seriously angry looking storm.

Check out the latest Satellite photo from NOAA…you don’t draw hurricanes that look this perfect…let alone see one on a satellite photo.



The National Hurricane Center confirmed that Rick’s new estimated core winds are sustained at 155- knots with gusts reaching the 190-knot range…so we are talking about 186-mph sustained winds and gusts topping out near 230-mph, which is pretty ridiculous. Hurricane Rick is definitely well into the Category 5 storm range and is expected to maintain this intensity for the next couple of days.

Man even the NHC is getting almost poetic in the description of Hurricane Rick…check out what they wrote in the latest update….classic.

HURRICANE RICK DISCUSSION NUMBER 11
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL EP202009
800 PM PDT SAT OCT 17 2009

THE SATELLITE PRESENTATION OF HURRICANE RICK CAN BE EXPRESSED IN ONE WORD...SPECTACULAR. THE EYE IS QUITE DISTINCT AND IS SURROUNDED BY VERY DEEP CONVECTION. ON THE LAST AVAILABLE VISIBLE IMAGES ONE COULD SEE THE SUNLIGHT REFLECTING OFF THE EASTERN SIDE OF THE EYEWALL AND THE STADIUM EFFECT THAT IS TYPICAL OF INTENSE HURRICANES.



At this point it looks like Rick may actually gather a little more strength over the next 12 hours and then go through what is called an “eyewall replacement/replenishment phase”, basically the storm becomes so intense that it actually sort of chokes itself off…as it does this the organized convection/spin that forms the hurricane “eye” is disrupted and the storm is forced to sort of check itself before it can gather its intensity again. Usually as this occurs we see the sustained winds take a decent drop in speeds…and it takes some time before the storm can gather its strength again. Unfortunately in this case the forecast models are also showing a change in the overall atmospheric conditions, with the introduction of some upper level sheering, at about the same time that Rick hits cooler water...which will likely speed up his destabilization and weaken the storm significantly from its current strength.

I know…I know… “That is great Adam, but how does that help me get waves”…damn you guys are impatient I was just getting to that. :)

Ok from a surf perspective…Rick is basically going to kick out some serious swell for all of the nearby areas…namely Mainland Mexico, which is so close that the affected areas are likely seeing some adverse weather possibly winds from him, and the Tip of Baja which he is traveling towards.

Since Rick has been hanging out and strengthening for the last couple of days I wouldn’t be surprised if new SE swell wasn’t already showing along the Tip of Baja…it won’t be huge yet…but the main push of swell will be arriving over the next day or so. With a storm this intense it is a little hard to gauge size…but conservatively the directly exposed areas would be consistently in the 10-15’ face range…with bigger bomb sets likely hitting 20’ (hell maybe bigger if the storm gets a good run at this Cat-5 strength). Personally I don’t think that the directly exposed spots will even be very surfable…just too much water moving around…but some of those partially exposed areas up in the Sea of Cortez both on the Baja Side, and potentially on the Mainland Mexico side (as the storm moves further west) could be a bit more survivable…not that I would ever advise anyone to go towards a Cat-5 storm.

How does this affect SoCal…at this point not much…the storm is still outside of our swell window. But, and this is sort of a big but, the forecasts are showing Rick potentially hitting the eastern edge of our swell window sometime early Monday morning…and still holding onto some of its intensity. I am not to stoked on the odds of this happening, mostly because storms have a tendency to hook back to the NE this time of year…and if the forecast run is already showing that recurve there is a good chance that it will be more defined by the time it actually happens, which means that it might not even reach our window before going back to the NE and crushing Cabo or something.

But let’s get hypothetical for a moment and say that the forecast is correct…if the storm does follow the current track, it would put it inside of our swell window for about 12-20 hours as it hooks back to the NE, still around Cat-4 strength. We get a bonus in that the storm is still very strong, has established sea-state, and is moving even more towards us (so does the Pacific Side of Baja Sur)…we get a negative for only a portion of the storm making it over the swell window shadow, and the relatively short time it would have to generate fetch/swell. So potentially we could see a new SE swell (155-165) heading our way for the 21st…likely in the head high to overhead range on the sets, and possibly bigger if the storm moves further into our swell window (or hangs in place for some reason).

So that being said…I am not putting much faith in a significant swell for Southern California at this point…most of us know that a hurricane/tropical system can pull up lame in the swell-department for all sorts of different reasons. I am however sort of cautiously optimistic that Rick can reach our swell window…and I will definitely dial in the forecast sizes/arrival times as this becomes more likely. In the meantime…I will have to continue to watch the stupid computer and see what Mr Ricky does…stupid hurricanes.