It's the season and I ain't talking about the holiday season. It is hurricane season in the Atlantic and this about the peak starting of the intensity.
Yesterday was the passing of hurricane Erin on the Northern Leeward island and I was seeing a lot of messages of my friends in Sint Maarten who were all really watching this storm with a close eye.
The projected path of these storms and also the matter of how they most likely will intensify is always a prediction and is subject to change and because of that something to monitor.
Now hurricane Erin went from a category 1 to a category 4-5 in just 24 hours. That also means that when the storm is close to you and that you are slacking your preparations 'because it is only a cat 1 storm', that means you can run into some issues really really fast.
And this storm is damn big as you can see in the image above coming from our friends of Windy which I use a lot actually when being on the water to see what the wind will be doing. It is a damn large area of wind and you can't entirely predict where it will be going and also how much swell it will bring.
Traffic
This is always one of the most interesting things to me when a weather situation is there. On Marinetraffic you can see very clear in the area of where the storm is now, that all the boats have left which have an AIS on board so you can locate them.
That big hole of no trackers? That means no one is there and that is for good reason. Well I guess you would be able to find some lost fishing boats or some lost sailing boats who didn't have the weather forecast so good envisioned.
This is the one good thing about hurricanes, you can see them starting to brew already days beforehand and can start to take preparations for that. Now these boats are slow, that means they had to start to move already days beforehand because this thing is coming.
I'm always thinking...say you are sailing over there (which is already not such a best move in hurricane season but okay) and you hear that storm is coming and you can travel only with 5 knots per hour which is about 8 km/h and you want to get out of the path of a monster like this....??
Well...uhhhh good luck I would say.
You can see the same circle in aviation traffic coming from Flightradar. Sure you can see some planes not having their paths changed as yet, but these guys have the ability to change their course quite easily.
A gap in the traffic and the airplanes taking some different routes. Seems wise...No one want to voluntarily go through that kind of heavy weather. Thanks but no thanks.
It aint over yet
Well the season is not done as yet for sure. The image below is the expected forecast of hurricane Erin and you can see it get's even bigger in size. Just look at it compared to any random state in the US.
Let's just hope it doesn't make landfall there as well.
Now there is still a lot more tropical movement going on coming from the tropics as that is where most of these storms start. The sea water is hot at the moment, feeding the storm in strength.
Stay safe during the season guys! Hurricanes are no joke!