UPDATE (SATURDAY): The Associated Press has an article this morning about damage. A lot of boats seemed to have been damaged because "people didn't take the storm seriously". They also say "Omar passed overnight Wednesday between St. Martin and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the government has spent more than US$1 million in cleanup costs. The storm caused more than US$700,000 in damages to roads in St. Croix and destroyed more than 100 utility poles in the eastern region." Still, this is not damage I would have expected from a Cat 3.

UPDATE:Here are some photos from Anguilla. It seems that damage is not severe. In fact, the NHC was quoted as saying the storm was a non-event: "It missed all the major land masses. The only land mass that we know it hit was an itsy-bitsy island called Sombrero and that's uninhabited." That quote seems a little odd to me, given the damage reported on several populated islands. Perhaps they meant that the highest, Cat 3 winds missed all land areas. I was surprised to see no surface stations gust above 51 knots. Whatever the case, I clearly got caught up in the hype, and my headline "Razes Islands" was probably too extreme (though what else could we assume when a Cat 3 storm is passing over small islands). My guess is the storm rapidly decreased in strength before it hit. Either that, or like Ike, there will be more harrowing reports to come.

Here are some pics from Aruba:

UPDATE: It's hard to judge how much rain fell. If you look at the Doppler Estimate from RadarPlus, it says 27" max since October 11, but this is often overstated because the radar beam runs into so many mountains (which also causes it to show strange spikes to the east). It shows a wide area of "more than 8 inches" east of Puerto Rico, so it's probably safe to assume that nearly a foot of rain fell on the islands to its east, with localized higher amounts due to terrain. On Puerto Rico itself, the storm missed most of the USGS gauges. One gauge in the northeast part of PR indicated just over 8 inches (archived map). The official map from the NWS Gauge-Adjusted Doppler-Precip Site for Puerto Rico was much lower, showing less than 3 inches on the main land, with 4 inches over water near the islands. The NWS page in San Juan had no rainfall amounts, though it did have a GIF animation of the radar during the entire storm (warning: large file, may slow/crash your browser).

ORIGINAL REPORT:

Omar became a Category 3 Hurricane last night as it razed the Leeward Islands. Since communications are down on many of the islands, we may not know the extent of the damage until this weekend. If the Cat 3 classification was correct, there was almost surely major damage and possible loss of life. Here's what it looked like late last night (download more images here):

The best eyewitness reports this morning are coming from the Caribbean Hurricane Network. Moderate damage has been reported, but some residents feel that this storm was nothing compared to what they have faced in the past.

Apparently on Antigua, there was quite a lightning storm last night Lightning is rare in major hurricanes, but Antigua is very far east, and in fact this thunderstorm was not part of the hurricane (see satellite), though spawned by it). I'll see if I can get a map of lightning later today.

I didn't see anything impressive from the coastal stations or buoys this morning, there weren't a lot in great locations, and (as always) some weren't operating. Nothing close to what we saw yesterday with the buoy that Omar ran over.

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