Here's an
update. Wake Island has been evacuated and Ioke is expected to make a pretty direct hit:
Category 5 hurricane Ioke (ee-OH'-kay), the 12th typhoon this year, continued westward as it passed the international dateline, packing winds of 160 mph and gusts up to 185 mph. It will begin tracking northwest and strike Wake Island at about 02:00 GMT on 31 August.
The typhoon force winds near the center of Ioke will continue to send large north and northeast waves towards the Marshall islands, said the latest National Weather Service storm advisory, issued Tuesday, August 28, 8:00 p.m. Guam time (11:00 p.m. Majuro time)
The U.S. Airforce evacuated all 200 workers from Wake yesterday. The eye of the typhoon could come within three miles of Wake by Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. The 18-ft to 40-ft storm surges may submerge the small island which is only 18-ft at its highest level and destroy eveything that is not made of concrete, said a NWS forecaster in Hawaii according, reported AP.
Tuesday night, the center of super typhoon Ioke, tracking west-northwest at 9 mph, was located near latitude 16.3 degrees north and longitude 173.0 degrees east. This is about 470 miles east-southeast of Wake Island, 420 miles north-northeast of Utirik and and 770 miles east-northeast of Enewetak, and 645 miles north of Majuro.
The typhoon center is expected to stay well-north of the Marshall Islands. Current advisories include hazardous surf of 10 to 12 feet along east and northeast facing reefs of Utirik, Wotje and Enewetak.
According to a NWS forecaster, Ioke is currently ranked the fifth-strongest storm ever seen in the Central Pacific in the Central Pacific, and is the first Category 5 storm in the region since 1994.
Typhoon Ioke is one of the longest-sustained storms in world history, having stayed at Category 4 for a week.
Ioke hit Johnston Atoll on August 23 with winds of 105 mph, and gusts of up to 125 mph. Thirteen people aboard a Air Force research vessel took shelter on Johnston in a concrete shelter designed for Category 4 storms.
This was a recent water vapor image of Ioke. It still boggles my mind comparing the latitude lines to where I live, and how much territory it would cover were it in the United States.
There's one choice for anything in this beast's way right now - Move.