Posted on 10/25/2015 2:27:46 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
...."We were fortunate as to where it made landfall. It was not a densely populated area," said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the U.S. National Hurricane Center. "You and I would be having a very different conversation if this went over the top of Puerto Vallarta."
He said the lack of fatalities was probably the result of the storm's narrow footprint. Category 5 winds extended 15 miles out on either side of the eye, and hurricane-force winds extended for 35 miles from the center of the storm.
On Saturday, Patricia's maximum sustained winds had dropped to 30 mph (45 kph), according to the hurricane center. The storm's remnants were expected to feed into existing rain hitting southern Texas.....
....The mountains in the area quickly weakened the storm, and the coastal landscape did not offer the large area of shallow water necessary for a storm surge that could have become a devastating wall of water.
The storm was also moving fast enough at landfall — about 20 mph (35 kph) — that its heavy rains "did not stay in place long enough to generate the kinds of devastating floods we've seen in the past from Mexican hurricanes," said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground.
Mexico's transport secretary, Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, put it another way: "Nature was good to us."
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
Cause very little low country
Mountains rise up pronto
Actually, THEY were fortunate. The merger of mexico and the USA has not been completed yet.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2015/graphics/ep20/loop_R.shtml
Panel on the left allows animated sequences of other probabilities throughout the life of the storm.
Hard to find anything about Patricia anymore.
Now it’s nothing more than a thunderstorm.
Makes you wonder how often such storms evolved and disappeared before satellite weather data was around.
From nothing to strongest Cat5 ever, then back to nothing within 24 hours, basically a 48 hour lifespan.
The strongest Hurricane ever? Really
What a Joke
Obama was ready to go blame Climate Change and now they are telling us we will have a hard winter
Yet it will set another record for the hottest year on record
Odunga and Gore are disappointed, no crises to not go to waste.
So they knew the eye was tight and headed toward mountains, yet they still hyped it as the strongest storm ever. Typical progressive fail. Confuse force with power.
Kind of funny how the promotion of the “Worst Storm Ever” dropped off the MSM over night.
Various meteorological stats indicate Patricia was a leader. Highest temperature for the eye (90degF). Lowest barometric pressure (779 mb) for the eastern Pacific. Matches the fastest forming Cat 5 within 24 hours. I’m just surprised there aren’t some newsworthy events reported of facilities being completely annihilated, i.e. even foundations removed.
Makes me question if the entire affair wasn’t hi tech rumor.
Meanwhile, the media was deeply disappointed.
I use this wind site every once in a while so I decided to check on the cat 5 hurricane. No eye was in the wind but out in the pacific there was a tight fast eye (still there). So if you want to check it out:
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-99.39,18.57,530
It is frightening to think about how such a powerful hurricane developed so quickly. Really amazing.
Based on its central pressure that fell to a record recorded low of 879 millibars (25.96 inches of mercury), breaking the previous record of 882 millibars set by Wilma in the Atlantic Basin, and top sustained wind speeds of 200 mph before making landfall, for a time Patricia WAS the “strongest” hurricane in Western hemisphere in modern times, since reliable satellite measurements and air reconnaissance.
And although it weakened rapidly before making landfall, the maximum sustained winds at landfall were estimated at 165 mph, still firmly within the Category 5 range on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
What is also somewhat unusual about this hurricane was that Patricia rapidly organized and intensified as maximum sustained winds with the storm increasing winds by 115 mph in a 24-hour window from 85 mph at 4 a.m. CDT on Oct. 22 to 200 mph at 4 a.m. CDT Oct. 23.
It also de-intensifed just as quickly, fell apart very quickly.
The good news for those in Mexico where the storm made landfall, was 1) that the storm intensified so rapidly and so close to the coast, that it didn’t have the time to build up a considerable storm surge – in hurricanes, more people are killed due to storm surge flooding than by wind, 2) the storm while very intense was also very compact - hurricane force winds extended outward only up to 30 miles from the center at landfall, and 3) it made landfall in a sparsely populated area and continued tracking, now greatly weakened over sparsely populated and mountainous regions of the interior, sparing the more densely populated coastal resort cities of Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta and the inland metropolis of Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city.
The remnants of Patricia however are causing big trouble for Texas and Louisiana where they’ve already been dealing with heavy rain.
http://www.weather.com/forecast/regional/news/patricia-texas-flooding-houston-austin-san-antonio
The classic tempest in a teapot. But the hype sure sold a lot of newspapers, didn’t it?
GOD was good to them! God answered prayers!
We’ve moved from storm to severe storm to super storm to mega storm. What is next?
Does anyone know how Galveston fared?
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