Friday, October 21, 2005

Wilma gets stranger

Wilma has made landfall on the Yucatan in Mexico, proving once again why one should purchase trip insurance when headed for the tropics in hurricane season.

Bryan Woods at StormTrack reports that Wilma has, incredibly, formed a double eyewall and, more incredibly, the inner eyewall shows no signs of collapsing. The eyewall is typically the strongest part of a hurricane, so the folks in Cozumel are getting pounded 4 times, rather than the customary 2. Woods tells us to expect "catastrophic" damage to Cozumel. Yikes.

The 6:00 pm EDT models predict landfall in Florida somewhere between Naples and Tampa. The one piece of good news in all this remains the northern Gulf, which is still colder than normal (due to the churning it received from Katrina and Rita), so the prediction is that Wilma will be down to Category 2 by the time it gets to Florida, which is now predicted to be on Monday.

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