OCTOBER STORM WAS FIERCE BUT NOT TROPICAL
October system lost its cyclone mojo before it hit Florida, NHC says.
Philippe whacked South Florida in October, causing two tornadoes in Palm Beach County and dropping rainfall of nearly 11 inches in some areas.
But a reanalysis by the National Hurricane Center of the late-season cyclone found it wasn’t a tropical storm when it strafed the Sunshine State.
Instead, Philippe had degenerated into a trough of low pressure while passing over west-central Cuba and before reaching the Florida Straits.
The postmortem on Philippe, GET THE APP
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WeatherPlus. which is standard procedure for every tropical cyclone forecast by the NHC in Miami, said the system lost its well-defined center — a key characteristic of a tropical storm — not long after reaching a peak intensity of 40 mph on Grand Cayman Island south of Cuba.
To be called a tropical cyclone, a system must have organized thunderstorms spinning counterclockwise around a well-defined closed-circulation center and not be attached to a frontal boundary.
“Operationally, the National Hurricane Center continued to issue advisories and maintained tropical storm warnings and watches for portions of southeastern Florida and the northwestern Bahamas (on Philippe) since there was an unusually high level of uncertainty in real time regarding the structure of Philippe’s circulation,” the report notes.
Philippe may have lived as a tropical storm for just six hours,
according to the report.
Still, tropical storm or not, Philippe packed a punch.
It hit South Florida late Oct. 28, buoyed by the development of a non-tropical low pressure area near the southeast coast of the state. Together, the two systems sent gale-force winds ashore, including 46-mph sustained winds at Fowey Rocks near Miami.
The National Weather Ser- vice in Miami said wind gusts reached as high as 80 mph in Palm Beach County, where two tornadoes touched down in Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach.
At least two homes at Parry Trailer Village, west of Boynton Beach, were damaged, while a trail of debris showed winds tore from south to north on an isolated path.
Residents said after the storm that damage was unlike anything else they’d seen this storm season.
“We didn’t get damage like this from (Hurricane) Irma,” Aida Figueroa said in October.
From Boca Raton to Lantana, between 8 inches and more than 9 inches fell in the 24-hour period between that in which the remnants of Philippe menaced South Florida.
An unincorporated area of Boynton Beach north of Gateway Boulevard received a staggering 10.93 inches of rain during the event.
While the details in the Philippe report are fodder for weather geeks, they also reinforce the fact that a system can still do damage even if it loses its tropical status.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy weakened to a post-tropical cyclone before it slammed into the Northeast, washing over barrier islands and damaging or destroying 650,000 homes.
Sandy ranks as the fourth-costliest storm on record for the U.S. behind hurricanes Maria (3), Harvey (2), and Katrina (1). Hurricane Irma is the fifth-costliest storm on record, with damages estimated at $50 billion.