Image courtesy of NOAA
In the past 4-6 hours, Tropical Storm Ernesto has gotten a lot healthier looking after nearly falling apart completely yesterday. In the graphic below you can see the pressure is now down to 994mb with maximum sustained winds now ramped up to 65 mph. I credit Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL for seeing this coming and he stated that beyond 80W, Ernesto would come back to life.
As you can see from the image above, the system is looking far more impressive with deep convection within and around the centre. Dry air was greatly surpressing Ernesto’s ability to keep the strong convection going and now that this influence is greatly reduced with a much more vertically stacked storm, the towering cumulonimbus towers can now draw up and in the much needed latent heat out of the warm Caribbean waters spiralling into the centre, venting this off the top in the form of outflow. Instead of being an open, exposed envelop, the newly firing ‘hot towers’ have now joined up, closing off the inner core from outside influences and their now spinning faster and faster around the intensifying core.
Right now, Ernesto appears to continue WNW which would take here just north of Honduras and with that track, there would be enough warm water influence and less land enfluence for longer which would have her continuing to intensify en-route to Belize. Pretty much all models agree on a Wednesday landfall but where is a little more of a dissagreement. Ernesto looks to make a Wednesday.
Here’s the current stats of Ernesto from the NHC (Graphic courtesy of The Weather Channel)
Map courtesy of The Weather Channel
Two possible tracks into Central America with two different outcomes
The current ECMWF run shows a more southerly track which would interact more with Honduras and this would make for a far weaker landfall and much further south into Belize whereas the well known tropical model, the GFDL, GFS and others have a stronger storm thanks to a more northerly track which keeps her off Honduras and more over the mid-80 degree waters. This more likely northerly track would have a potential Category 1 Hurricane Ernesto stricking near but just south of the Belize-Mexico border.
The more northerly track also provides Ernesto with a chance of simply crossing the relatively narrow and less hilly southern Yucatan with the warm waters of the Bay of Cam,peche in it’s sights. This scanry would allow for less disruption to the storm structure and a chance to return to hurricane status if atmospheric conditions are favourable by Thursday. This second scenario would have a landfall into the Mexican mainland, quite possibly as a strong Cat 1, maybe weak Cat 2 by Friday between Poza Rica and Ciudad Madero.
GFDL model run for Wed (Courtesy of AccuWeather Pro)
GFS model run for Wed (Courtesy of AccuWeather Pro)
ECMWF model run for Wed (Courtesy of AccuWeather Pro)
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