UPDATE: Here is a great satellite shot of Ida at her best this morning.
She has now moved inland over Nicaragua and weakened, as predicted. Now... we wait to see if she'll restrengthen when her center gets back over water. Here are the latest model predictions for strength (yellow=hurricane) and long-term track (note that a lot of the models are suggesting a solution that goes against the historical maps shown below).
NOTE: This blog may not be updated; we have several videos and news stories on AccuWeather.com regarding this storm and you can get the latest tracks at Hurricane.AccuWeather.com.
Here are some interesting historical maps of November tropical storms. I am amused this morning at the number of people who declared Hurricane season over last month.
They did this because November is normally a slow month for Hurricanes, and it's easy to plot every storm in the NOAA Coastal Services Center Hurricane GIS system. Here's a map of every documented, named or numbered storm in November and their tracks:
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One of the thing that jumps out here is that very few storms are able to move westward in the Gulf when they come from the Caribbean. The most notable exception was Hurricane Jeanne in 1980 and she was NOT the last storm of that season!)
Another thing you notice is that most storms do make landfall, because it's hard to get out of the Gulf without hitting land, and it's hard for the storms to dissipate with the warm water this time of year there.
As Joe Bastardi says though, the standard for a major hurricane which made landfall in November (Cat 3 in Gulf, Cat 1 at landfall) is Hurricane Kate in 1985.
If you instead select only November storms passing near Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua (approximately where Ida is centered right now), you get these tracks and can see that no storm with these qualifications has ever hit the northern Gulf Coast.
We're writing a story with Joe's thoughts right now but some bullet points from a talk he gave in our morning meeting are as follows:
- Ida will hug the coast for now, therefore weaken, will probably move very slow and could become a major, sprawling hurricane when she emerges northward into the Gulf; the heat potential of the water there is higher than anywhere else in the Atlantic basin (NOAA map below -- this is different than sea-surface temperatures or their anomalies and takes the whole vertical profile of the ocean into account).
- This will be a long storm (we are not projecting her to emerge in the Gulf until Tuesday).
- She will cause disruption, but not destruction, to oil operations.
- Best guess at landfall at this time is western Florida but we've got a long way to go and a lot of things could change.
- Storm to her left will move into western Gulf and cause high winds and waves regardless of whether or not NHC names it.
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