Gordon weakens, Florence grows
As Tropical Storm Gordon flooded Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Hurricane Florence roared up to a Category 4, with two more systems behind it catching the eye of forecasters.
As Hurricane Florence ballooned to a Category 4 hurricane on Wednesday, its long-term future still not clear, two more future potential cyclones were looming behind it on the hurricane assembly line that is the African coast at this time of the year.
Florence, said by forecasters to be no threat to Florida at this point, is the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season’s first major hurricane. With wind speeds measuring 130 mph, the storm was moving northwest in the central Atlantic at a pace of about 13 mph, which means it would still be traversing the open ocean into next week.
Also on Wednesday, hours after Florence intensified to the season’s first major hurricane, Tropical Storm Gordon landed near the border of Alabama and Mississippi.
Blamed for the death of a Florida baby, when a tree fell onto a mobile home in Pensacola, Gordon weakened Wednesday but still spread bands of heavy rains across a swath of the South as it swirled over central Mississippi.
It promised more of the same on a forecast track expected to take it northeast into Arkansas, which was forecast to get heavy rain from the system by Wednesday night. By Saturday, what’s left of the storm was forecast to hook to the north, then northeast on a path toward the Great Lakes. National Weather Service offices in Missouri and Oklahoma said Gordon’s remnants could add to the rain caused by a frontal boundary already causing heavy rains in parts of the Midwest. Flash flood watches stretched from the Florida panhandle through parts of southwest Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois.
Gordon never reached hurricane strength by the time it came ashore just west of the Mississippi-Alabama line. Its maximum sustained winds reached 70 mph. It knocked out power to at least 27,000 utility customers in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi
Whether or not Florence will survive and thrive is up in the air, literally, thanks to wind shear, which refers to changes in wind speeds at varying heights in the atmosphere. Wind shear is basically a storm killer.
In a Wednesday afternoon analysis, hurricane forecasters said Florence was near the southern edge of a zone of strong vertical shear and as a result had been predicted to weaken. Instead Florence defied those expectations and strengthened.
“Beyond 48 hours, vertical shear is anticipated to weaken, which would allow Florence to intensify and potentially regain major hurricane status,” said a forecast analysis from the National Hurricane Center.
“However, Florence will need to thread the needle between areas of stronger shear for this to happen, and there is significant uncertainty in the intensity forecast.”
So where will it go? The hurricane center’s forecast cone was predicting a continued journey northwest in the open ocean toward the vicinity of Bermuda, a trip that will unfold over the next few days and into next week. By Monday afternoon, Florence was expected to be at least several hundred miles southeast of Bermuda.
As of Wednesday, Florence was about 2,000 miles from South Florida.
“Given the large uncertainty at these time ranges, it is far too soon to speculate what, if any, impacts Florence may have on the U.S. East Coast next week,” the National Hurricane Center said in a Wednesday afternoon forecast analysis.