Hurricane Willa
Hurricane Willa is forecasted to make landfall, along the coast of Mexico, within the next few hours. Willa, once deemed a Category 5 hurricane, has been downgraded to a Category 3 hurricane within the last 24 hours, with max sustained winds at 125 mph, moving north-northeast at 6 mph according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) at 9AM MDT. The majority of people that reside in Willa’s path have been ordered to evacuate, with high winds, copious precipitation, storm surge and flooding to be expected. Below, geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites observed the event, where satellite imagery can be inspected below.
Advected Layered Precipitable Water (ALPW): 1800-1200Z, 22-23 October 2018
ALPW measures Precipitable Water (PW) values within four layers of the atmosphere (i.e. surface-850mb, 850-700mb, 700-500mb, 500-300mb) to identify where the majority of PW is concentrated (i.e. usually within the first 3 kilometers above the surface). For simplicity, the ALPW surface-850mb layer video is shown below, showing the location of Hurricane Willa, as it approaches the Mexican coast. Note, ALPW utilizes GFS model winds in the algorithm, and is updated every 6 hours. The modeled product shows the hurricane’s forecasted track yesterday, through this morning, 23 October 2018. High PW values are shown in red, where black pixels within the hurricane, denote precipitating regions. Microwave products such as ALPW, cannot retrieve data samples within areas of precipitating regions (i.e. displayed areas of missing data), however retrievals can sample within cloudy regions.
GOES-16 10.3um: 1450-1600Z, 23 October 2018
Infrared imagery, at a high temporal resolution (i.e. in this case, every 5 minutes) shows the magnitude of the Willa as the eyewall begins to traverse the Islas Marias then move toward the Mexican coast. Deep convection (i.e. regions of heavy precipitation) denoted in dark red-to-black colors, is spotted predominately to the north and west of the eyewall.
For the latest updates on Hurricane Willa, click on the following link.