Record Storm: Bering Sea Bomb Hits Alaska Islands

Ladies and gentlemen... we may have a record-breaker.* NOAA's Ocean Prediction Center said in an update overnight:

"At 06Z November 08 OPC analyzed the central pressure of post-tropical Nuri to 924mb. In terms of central pressure, this is now one of the strongest known Northern Pacific cyclones on record. The lowest pressure ever recorded in Alaska from such a storm was 925mb during the October 25-26, 1977 time frame at Dutch Harbor, AK."

The official Pacific Surface Weather map is shown above; click here for an animation. This is what it looked like on satellite last night:

Last night, the NWS Alaska office reported that Sheyma, on one of the Aleutian Islands, winds gusted to 84 knots, or 97 mph.

The OPC described the rapid pressure falls with the storm:

"Post-tropical Nuri has continued its rapid intensification, and at 00Z OPC analyzed the central pressure to 927mb. In its extratropical transition the low has deepened 57mb in the past 24 hours, 37mb in just the past 12 hours."

More images of the storm are available in my blog from Thursday and Friday. Wind speeds & pressure from the 06Z GFS model (with METARS at 12Z today) are shown on the map below:

*Despite what NOAA said, there are no good records of storms in this area, at least before the modern era, so we may never know if this is a record. This graph from Ryan Maue on Twitter shows a couple storms that were close... if we believe this data then this is the strongest in 25 years, though there are estimations that show today's storm even lower, at 920mb. What the HPC said was that this was probably the strongest including 1977... before that we don't have good records.