Extraordinary Radar Imagery for Hurricane Harvey

The importance of having weather radars along our coasts is highlighted by the amazing imagery from the NWS radars at Brownsville and Corpus Cristi.

Here is one at 6:44 AM PDT this morning. The circular eye of Hurricane Harvey is obvious.   Look closely and you will see evidence of a double eye.  This often occurs as a hurricane goes through a eyewall replacement cycle, in which an exterior eyewall develops and then shrinks in radius and intensifies.   Storm often strengthen as the outer eye wall  tightens inward around the low center.

With coastal radars, hurricanes (and other storms) can be examined comprehensively as they approach land.  They are in fact, the CAT scans or MRIs of the meteorological profession.    The importance of such coastal radars is why many of us pushed for a radar on the Washington coast at Langley Hill and why folks in Oregon are pushing for a radar on the Oregon coast---the last great gap in U.S. coastal radar coverage.  The central pressure of Hurricane Harvey is about 950 hPa.   The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 was similar:   955 hPa.

Our ability to follow hurricanes is not limited to weather radar.  Improving satellite imagery, such as from GOES-16, provides amazing views from space (see below).  You can even see a very small hurricane eye.

And during the last few days Air Force and NOAA aircraft have been traveling in the storm, taking flight level observations and dropping instrumented packages called dropsondes.   Here is a graphic that show the winds at flight level from an aircraft now in the storm.

We can no longer be surprised by approaching coastal storms or hurricanes with all these assets.  But our models are still inadequate for predicting variations in intensity and there is some research suggesting that intensity prediction more than a day out may not be possible....we will see.

Current model runs are unanimous that Harvey will strike the south/central Texas coast later today and that there will be a huge amount of rain.  They disagree about intensity and subsequent path (see below).  But nearly all suggest at least a CAT 2-3 storm, with max winds exceeding 110 mph.

from Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog http://ift.tt/2wExxc0