OT: Hurricane Patricia

hate to get to off topic and blow up the boards with this right around the Duke game (so I'll throw in a quick game-time forecast at the bottom too) but this is kind of historic and I just sat through three hours of talks about it...so heres a few notes

Hurricane Patricia has just reached a record tying pressure reading of 878 Hpa, with wind speeds recorded around 210 MPH around the eye wall. What that basically translates to is around the eye, (about 10 miles in diameter right now) there are currently winds as strong as a category 5 tornado. Yes think of it as a 10 mile wide tornado. CRAZY. also the whole pressure thing... so pressure gets lower as you get higher correct? Well 890 HPa is typically recorded around a kilometer in the sky. Imagine if you just sliced a kilometer of the air out of our atmosphere and how much air must rush up to fill the void!!!

I havent even gotten to the craziest part yet, the storm fired up overnight. It seriously dropped 100 HPa in a single evening, and went from basically a completely irrelevant system that might bring some rain to one of the strongest hurricanes ever OVERNIGHT. that doesnt JUST happen... but it did! furthermore the models blew it on this one, seems there is a major lack of appreciation from them about intensifying storms. The most wild prediction from any of the models was at most a category 2 storm out of this, not even close to what we got.

Couple of theories out there as to what might be happening, the obvious explanation is the effect of "godzilla el nino" on it. With a deep warm layer of water and salinity (the surface temperatures are reading around 90 degrees Fahrenheit at the moment, and those temperatures basically maintain as deep as a couple hundred feet) is providing a lot of moisture content to feed into the storm and further instability for the storm to increase in strength. This year due to the severe nature of the El Nino event, we've actually seen a ton of super severe storms in the Pacific. we're up to 8 storms now of category 4 or higher, another record...A factor that a lot of meteorologists/atmospheric scientists are avoiding talking about because its not fully understood is the presence of a kelvin wave and its influence on the system...if youre in the AOS field expect some money to be dipped into this shortly if our fields happen to overlap in work related fields.

So a lot of you are saying well, its over by Mexico, not gonna effect me...wrong, not only is Mexico about to see about as much rain as South Carolina got the other week, but Patricia is also going to work her way up into the Houston area, we're looking at probably a foot of rain there, in an area that has been saturated in the last month or so. Furthermore the system is going to have lasting down stream effects driving into the Midwest and mid Atlantic, providing some instability and creating some potential for rain next week.

WOOH sorry to get all of that out but I hope you all understand the severity of it and the whole reason I'm having a weathergasm here.

ON TO THE DUKE GAME

Luckily for us there is a high over the north east shielding us from any systems and keeping us dry. We should be in for a beautiful weekend for the game. Highs should top out in the mid 60s and lows should dip down to around 55 with some cloud cover to boot as well. The rain should hold off until next week when Patricia's downstream effects are eventually felt and we get rain Tuesday or wed.

I am disagreeing with the NWS forecast for the first time this semester really hard, I really think the system coming over the midwest right now is in for a rough time these next few hours, and wont budge the high currently parked up in the northeast. Not totally confident, but I wouldnt be surprised at all if the rain held off this weekend or if we got a slight drizzle late saturday night and into sunday morning. The game should be good to go though!

I expect this to be a defensive game and very sloppy at that, not because I think our defense is great, but because I think Duke's offense is mediocre this year.

Final predictions

High 68
Low 58
Winds 5 MPH gusts
Precip nada during a game bring a rain jacket to the bars

GO HOKIES