Friday, August 22, 2008

Fay chugs on; potentially dangerous disturbance 94L approaches Lesser Antilles

There is an interesting tone to Dr. Masters' post today (and some historical comps).
From Wunderblog:

Tropical Storm Fay continues its leisurely tour of Florida, chugging slowly westward along the northern Gulf Coast. Radar and satellite loops show no major changes to Fay. The storm still has a large circulation with plenty of rain bands sprawling over much of northern Florida and southern Georgia. Fay is headed towards the waters of the extreme northern Gulf or Mexico near the Big Bend region of Florida, and should be able to pull in enough moisture from the Gulf to at least maintain its current strength through Sunday. Fay may be able to intensify to a 50-55 mph tropical storm, but I don't see it reaching hurricane strength, due to the close proximity of the storm to land.

Fay's rains
Fay has brought the Melbourne, Florida region its greatest single-storm rainfall on record. By 1 am EDT today, Fay had dumped 22.83" of rain on Cape Canaveral. The previous rainfall record for a tropical cyclone in the region was set in 1950, when Hurricane King dumped 15.44" of rain on Patrick Air Force Base near Cape Canaveral. Hurricane Wilma of 2005 holds third place--it dumped 13.26" on Kennedy Space Center.

Fay is also one of Florida's rainiest storms on record. According to Wikipedia and NOAA, the eleven rainiest Florida tropical cyclones of all time were:

Easy (1950) 38.70" Yankeetown
Georges (1998) 38.46" Munson
Unnamed (1941) 35.00" Trenton
Dennis (1981) 25.56" Homestead
TD 1A (1992) 25.00" Arcadia Tower
Jeanne (1980) 24.98" Key West
Dora (1964) 23.73" Mayo
TD (1969) 23.40" Havana
Unnamed (1924) 23.22" Marco Island
Bob (1985) 21.50" Everglades City
Alberto (1994) 21.38 Niceville.

MORE (esp. 94L heads up)