Good morning. Could not spend any time on storm tracking until now because of some critical personal things I had to attend to.
Poor Cozumel, they really got hammered by a solid Cat 4 slow-moving Wilma. She really cleaned up her act before landfall, and in spite of the repeated sheering off of the NW side of the circulation she kept coming back and rebuilding it. It was clear that the eyewall gained some strength even while the western side kept getting shredded. Looks like the eyewall just finished clearing out (and has been shrinking since I went to bed at around 2 or 3am), and in fact has never looked "better" than right now. I caught some of the recon output -- not all -- from last night/this morning's run, and saw that there were additional wind maximums, so I wouldn't be surprised if she was almost ready for another ERC even having just barely recovered from this one. I see the eye shrunk a bit before landfall so I imagine the eyewall winds tightened up even more. Very bad for Cozumel. I am afraid that when word starts getting out in a some days or a week, that they will have experienced not only a huge surge, which may have engulfed most or even all of the island, but also tremendous damage from the winds. I unfortunately am visualizing the aerial images after Katrina of the Buras-Triumph area.
Fortunately they will have quite some time in the large eywall for people to possibly make it to safety to a taller building, before getting hammered again. However it looks like this one could stay in their vicinity for quite some time without losing too much ground. I can't even imagine what they are going through and what is in store for them today.
I really hate watching the landfall, and so at this point it is really hard for me to look forward beyond these moments and try to anticipate FL landfall.
I read the 10am, and Knabb's writeups were really outstanding. All night I'd been watching the steering layer with those two ridges from the two highs each alternately becoming dominant in the steering, but didn't articulate that in my posts. He made it very clear in the writeup. And BTW they have changed again and as of right now indicate a slightly NNE movement / little or no movement, however it seems as of right now the high over Mex is weaker and is giving a bit, which is possibly what is allowing the NW movement:
Someone made a comment about the NHC track not changing much -- Wilma has spent some days hanging around the Caribbean. NHC's reasoning is to pick the most likely track (and boy do they know how to pick a winner; they've had an amazing track record), and then only make minor adjustments, until a big reason comes along to make a big change to the track. Well that big reason hasn't happened yet. An example is when the track for Katrina was moved 150m to the west, from the FL panhandle to the MS Gulf Coast.
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