Respect for the Recent Show by Hurricane Hector!

By Jordan Rabinowitz

DISCUSSION: Within the past two weeks and then some, the world had the opportunity to watch Hurricane Hector evolve in quite an impressive fashion.  As is shown in the animated radar loop above per the radar site in southern Hawaii, there was quite an impressive radar display on-hand for all those who had the chance to observe this intense tropical cyclone evolve. As the above radar animation, you can see how at that point in time, Major Hurricane Hector was quickly approaching southern Hawaii at a distance of around 150 to 160 miles to the south.  Thus, it was far enough away to minimize any and all impacts which were felt on the southernmost island in the state of Hawaii, but still close enough for the radar site to capture the shorter-term evolution of this intense tropical cyclone.

In taking a closer look at Hurricane Hector, you can see how Hector maintained a fairly tightly-wrapped and compact circulation which did not change its course all that much during the course of this radar animation. For that reason, this nearly consistent westerly motion allowed for some more reasonable visual analysis of additional features associated with Hurricane Hector to be studied. For example, as the eye of Hurricane Hector approached a position which was almost exactly perpendicular to the radar site in southern Hawaii, you can begin to see the deepest convection associated with the eye wall of what was a Major Hurricane Hector. In addition, you can also see the feature which is most commonly referred to as the moat of an intense tropical cyclone.  The moat is the region which is most often found between the eye wall of a tropical cyclone and the first outer rain-band.

The only catch with Hurricane Hector was that Hurricane Hector was an annular tropical cyclone during most of its peak intensity period which allowed the tropical cyclone to have near-perfectly symmetric rainbands during this period of time.  This is impressive since the large majority of tropical cyclones do not maintain a classic annular structure for a multi-day period since oceanic sea-surface temperatures as well as low/mid-level atmospheric environmental conditions have to be just right.

To learn more about other high-impact weather events occurring across Central and Eastern Pacific Ocean, be sure to click here!

© 2018 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz