From the Pacific to Texas to the far Caribbean, the tropics showed up as the Weekend Headline!
Clearly, the most devastating was ours, Hurricane Hanna, taking a clear shot on South Texas, battering boats, toppling trees and flooding roads and homes. Look at the rain amounts on Doppler radar out of Brownsville from Friday evening to this morning, most of which came on Saturday. This looks like a Jackson Pollock masterpiece:
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The purple images indicate 10-12″ of rain with the white at 15″ of rain! The slow motion of the storm at 8 mph fit right in with my rule of thumb: 100 divided by the movement of the storm equals inches of rain. 100/8 = 12.5 and a foot of rain was easy to find. It’s just common sense -- the faster the storm moves the less rain it drops and the slower it moves the more it drops (Harvey moved at 2-3 mph and 33″ to 50″ of rain fell).
And the winds rocked to 90 mph creating a 4-6′ storm surge across Baffin Bay and Corpus Christi. The man in the photo below, what he is feeling, is, to me, the real story.
The other 2 storms
To our west we watched Hurricane Douglas, which toppled a tree or two in Hawaii, but mostly produced what surfers love:
The heaviest rains stayed north of the islands and the same went for Tropical Storm Gonzalo over the weekend. Tobago had a tree down and that was about it. Of 10 shelters that opened, only twelve people showed up.
So what a weekend for storm watching. And it’s still July. Next up: Isaias (ees-ah-EE-ahs). Swirling in the Atlantic, there is a 90% chance of development this week.
Stay safe! You can see some remarkable social media pics of Hanna and its damage at Click2Houston.com right here.
Frank