Tropical Zone Gardening: Things hotting up ...... cooling down?, 0 by tropicbreeze

tropicbreeze wrote:
Olga is still 'equivocating' more than making any definite moves. Although having reached the intensity of a cyclone again, the weather bureau doesn't classify it as more than "ex-tropical cyclone" because it's still over land. They did this with Laurence when it first moved over us last December. They were about to declare it a tropical cyclone when it edged over us (land) so they held off. Later it moved back out to sea and ended up becoming a category 5.

They still expect Olga to be pushed northwards and then eastwards, although she's still moving northwest. There's a ridge to the south pushing her west, but a trough moving in from the west forcing her east. At the moment the ridge is winning. Vertical wind shear is dropping rapidly now so the Old Girl (she's been around a long time for a cyclone) could get a lot more life into her.

Meantime we're getting severe storms coming through with the outer cloud bands. When I get home tomorrow night I'll find out how my rain total for January is coming along. Was 74% above average last weekend, got a good chance of reaching 100% by end of this weekend.

The satellite image is from the JTWC in Hawaii and shows with a red "x" the centre position of Olga. I've added the yellow arrow to make it easier to find. The big cloud mass in the top left is comprised of the severe storms that came through last night. The satellite picture is 3:00am this morning our time (17:30Z yesterday).