Tropical Alert – First Hurricane of the Season (and she is a potential wave-maker for Socal)

Just wanted to drop another heads up on our tropical activity…as of this afternoon the East Pacific Tropics has its first hurricane of the 2010 season.



Tropical Storm Celia has intensified into Hurricane Celia…and if that wasn’t enough…her forecasted track, and forecasted maximum wind speeds have both become a lot better looking.



The latest NHC forecast is calling for Hurricane Celia to intensify into a Major Hurricane (Major Hurricane means that sustained winds will be greater than 93-knots) by Tuesday…with forecasted winds hitting 100-knots and gusts reaching 120-knots. That slow WNW curving track is going to push Celia into the Socal swell window by Thursday (June 24). The slight tack toward Socal, as well as the slow movement speed (around 6-8 knots)…will let this storm spend a lot of time over the same stretch of water, the more time it can spend in the same place, or moving toward us, the more energy that it can load up into the swell.

You can see on the forecast map that the storm is a ways south, and still a ways from the Socal swell window…it will take about 3-4 days for the storm to push into a position where it can send us swell (though it will be sending Baja Sur swell all of this week). Once the storm is in our window it still takes a couple of days for the energy to reach us…so Socal potentially could see some new SE swell as early as June 26th…but will probably see the swell arrive mostly on the 27th and then hang on for a couple of days afterwards.

It is still a bit early for surf heights from this one…but if it can live up to this forecast I would expect some overhead sizes at the standout SE facing spots as this swell peaks. I am sure I will be updating this as Celia continues to develop.