Going into the eye of Ike

This is what it looks like when a weather buoy goes into the eye -- winds go up, air temperature and pressure drop dramatically. Unfortunately, that may have been the end of this buoy -- it had not reported for more than 2 hours after these readings.

This buoy is (maybe was) about 123 miles southeast of Galveston, about 13 miles from the 4 p.m. position of the Gulf-eating Hurricane.

-steve buser

Hurricane Ike blowing ashore near Galveston in Texas

The chart above shows the windspeed at the National Buoy Data Center's buoy on the Jetty at Galveston Bay. Galveston is the island that seaward of Houston.. The winds were just shy of 40 knots just after 4 p.m.

The picture below is a satellite view of Hurricane Ike about the same time. The storm is different from other storms in that the eye is not clearly visible and is not tightly compact.
Scientist will have a long time to study that and find out why. One immediate impact if it holds up like that when Ike's eye hits land -- at 12 mph, some people will be in the eye 4 or 5 hours.

Below the satellite photo is a graph showing how fast the barometric pressure is falling as Ike approaches


--steve buser

Hurricane Ike splashing and spitting in Gulf

The buoy in the Gulf south of Dauphin Island, AL is giving us a good picture of the power of Hurricane Ike more than 200 miles away from it. The photo shows the wind speed and below are the readings (both at 8:50 a.m. CDT) Info from the National Data Buoy Center of NOAA.

	Wind Speed (WSPD):	29.1 kts
	Wind Gust (GST):	36.9 kts
	Wave Height (WVHT):	24.9 ft

--steve buser

Texas media starting to ramp up Hurricane Ike news

This buoy off Sand Key, FL is reporting winds of 54kts out of the east south east, showing the Florida keys will be getting some strong effects for Hurricane Ike as it passes by the dangling state. The best real time site to watch Hurricane Ike, right now, is the radar at Casablanca, Cuba.

Meanwhile, the weather news is picking up in the Houston area after yesterdays the oil companies sprang to action:

Oil, gas companies do it all over again

here's the Houston Chronicle's Hurricane Central

Corpus Christi's Caller Times is paying close attention to Hurricane Ike

The Brownsville Herald is also keeping track of where the storm will be targeting in the lower Texas coast

Even the Beaumont Enterprise on the the upper Texas coast reports events beginning to be cancelled in anticipation of the weather events to come.

--steve buser

Ike slides along Cuban coast -- Texas is the bullseye

The new Hurricane Ike path from NOAA keeps New Orleans just on the edge of the cone of error. The Central Texas Coast is in the center. This puts a real burden on the Houston and Corpus Christi areas to keep and eye on the storm but pushes back likely landfall to Saturday.

Cuba is also taking its toll on the storm with the maximum sustained winds down to 85 mph.

Weather in the Keys
The winds are starting to pick up in the Florida Keys with the Sombrero Key buoy reporting 28kt sustained winds and long key reporting 22kt winds. Sand Key, the furthest buoy on the strand out from the mainland is reporting 31kts winds.

Real Time Buoy data
Here's some real time buoy data from the west side of the storm.

--steve buser

Recovering from one storm with and Eye on Hurricane Ike

You expect trees to fall across power lines during a storm, leaving customers without power. But when the big towers end up looking like pixie sticks, you know you have some work to do to get power back on This pictures from Entergy.com, Entergy's web site, show some of what they had to do with up and down the state of Louisiana. This tangle is from Plaquemine, but similar pictures are posted from St. Gabriel and elsewhere.

Can the system be hardened enough for another hurricane barrelling into the Gulf this week?

Here's a excerpt from an Entergy PowerPoint that shows how fast power was brought back up in the New Orleans region. I left out the other regions of the state to make the file smaller. Also, I converted it to PDF, so most people can see it.


Keep Track of Ike's Passage through the Florida Straits:
Here's an interesting site to keep track of the readings from the buoys and weather stations in the Florida Keys.

--steve buser