Hurricane Oscar forms in the Atlantic with 'unexpected' strong winds
Source: USA Today
Published 11:45 a.m. ET Oct. 19, 2024 | Updated 4:20 p.m. ET Oct. 19, 2024
A storm system in the Caribbean rapidly escalated Saturday from a tropical storm into Hurricane Oscar, the 10th hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
Forecasters said Oscar's winds were much stronger than previously thought and declared the system a hurricane at 2 p.m. ET. Oscar's maximum sustained winds were about 80 mph with stronger gusts, which was "unexpected," forecasters said. It could strengthen more on Saturday before gradual weakening begins next week.
Oscar could bring indirect impacts to East Coast beaches in the U.S. from a long period swell in the coming days, according to the National Weather Service in Melbourne, Florida. Oscar was also the eighth named storm to form since Sept. 24, breaking a record for most named storms formations between Sept. 24 and Oct. 19, set in 1950, Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University, posted on X.
Hurricane warnings were issued for the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Southeastern Bahamas, while Cuba has issued hurricane watches for the Guantanamo, Holguin and Las Tunas provinces.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2024/10/19/storm-tracker-tropical-storm-nadine-oscar-path-spaghetti-models/75750812007/
That thing blew up from a "tropical rainstorm" to a tropical storm to a hurricane all today! It's been slowly drifting west for the past week.
= new reply since forum marked as read
(and that is what it is sortof bumping up against), then it might stall and start heading more southerly and then to the SE.
Right now it's a big blob of convection!
But it's also government-speak - "CONUS" = "Continental United States".
There is a strong flow from the high pressure system over the east that rotates clockwise meaning the wind currents would move from NE to SW.
These things need some kind of "steering current" (whether atmospheric or ocean) to move them along with their own spinning momentum. I had noticed between the "1 pm" and "4 pm" updates, it had slowed down and might not go that much further west before turning as it bangs up against the flow from that high that would want to push it to the SW.
It could even loop around too. Will have to see! If it moves far enough east away from the high, it could jump on the Gulf Stream for a trip to Europe!
