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Rare South Atlantic Hurricane Heads Toward Brazil
jellisky writes "An unprecendented sort of weather event has been occuring recently, without much fanfare at all. A tropical cyclone in the south Atlantic is slowly drifting toward Brazil. The southern Atlantic ocean isn't exactly a hurricane hotbed, as pointed out by National Hurricane Center forecaster Jack Beven, "We know there hasn't been a hurricane in that area since at least the satellite era, the mid-60s at the minimum." The storm is a small one, though, but has estimated winds near minimal hurricane strength (74-95 mph). It's quite an interesting sight, perfect for piquing the weather curiousity that many of us have."
We had the tail end of a hurricane from baja hit southern California about 2 years ago... a very rare event.
It didn't do a whole lot of damage; many areas get 80-90mph Santa Ana winds occasionally.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Over the last year there have been several unusual hurricane events. The first recorded hurricane in the Atlantic to occur in April was in 2003, along with the first recorded hurricane in December, both breaking long-standing records. This one however is most unusual because of the weather patterns in that part of the world. While they have most of the necessary conditions (warm water, weather systems) the prevailing winds blow from west to east (as opposed to east to west for the North Atlantic tropics), usually tearing systems that could develop into shreads.
This becomes a problem because unlike areas that are used to hurricanes (US, Carribbean, Pacific, Australia, Madagascar) the Brazilians have no experience with tropical systems, so they have no way of knowing what to expect. Having lived through 16 of them (including Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1969 and Andrew in 1992) all I can say is that anyone living in the potential landfall area might want to consider going inland a ways.
A good site to look at is the Naval Research Labs Monterey hurricane page located here:
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/tc_pages/tc_home.html
It lists all of the systems they are following, along with a very good collection of satellite images.
Maybe it's one of the first signs that this prediction may be accurate.
And, as the article says, Bush thinks Global Warmin is a hoax. Typical.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Most of the South Atlantic is actually cooler than average, so it seems unlikely that global warming is to blame.