00:00Well, this is indeed a historic day in the Caribbean and for the Atlantic Basin as a
00:07whole, as we have tied the record with the Labor Day hurricane in the Florida
00:11Keys in 1935, matching the intensity of that storm with landfall in southwest
00:17Jamaica today. And with our forecast feed, we want to take a look at the continual
00:21impacts this will bring. We're going to go behind the curtain a little bit, look at
00:25some computer models as to the impacts for the rest of the Caribbean in places
00:28like, well, we're looking at areas still around Haiti with some winds, kind of
00:34inflow bands on the southeast side of the storm. We'll look at the impacts into
00:37Cuba and other parts of the Bahamas and even Bermuda as well. A quick look at the
00:42current status of the storm. You can see that the eye has closed off and that's
00:46not a surprise after interacting with land in the mountains here across Jamaica.
00:51The center of the storm has bisected the western side of Jamaica, but again at the
00:55beginning of this loop you can see its status when it made landfall. A fierce,
00:59fierce storm. This storm has been very notable in so many different ways. It's
01:04been with us for a full week and it's taken a week to go from an area south, due
01:08south of Punta Cana, now to an area along the north coast of Jamaica. This deep
01:14purple shows us the hurricane-force wind and the path that that has taken. Very, very
01:20slow movement. Sometimes it just takes a day for a storm, a fast-moving tropical wave to go
01:25from point A to point B. This has taken a week and again meteorologist Mike Dahl here
01:29at AccuWeather. He's a wizard with data and he calculated this storm as of
01:34yesterday had the slowest average forward speed for any named storm or
01:40hurricane I should say hurricane in the central Caribbean by a pretty good
01:44margin and it actually slowed down after this stat was character captured for a
01:48bit and then it began to speed up a little bit and now we've seen movement at
01:527 to 10 miles per hour for much of the late afternoon. Category 4 hurricane at
01:57this point we're looking at landfall late tonight into early tomorrow morning as a
02:01category 3 storm and then we have some questions. I'm going to move into the
02:04models here in a moment but some questions as to could this be absorbed by
02:08a trough? If this trough is oriented just a little more negatively that would
02:12scoop it up and kind of sling it into parts of the Canadian Maritimes. If it's
02:16oriented precisely as we have this drawn then the more likely scenario will be
02:21that is guided out to sea may be a little more likely to take the eastern
02:25part of that track. Now let's take a look at the models here and I wanted to
02:28point out a couple of things here with the way this AccuWeather professional
02:33site works here with the models. Near the center of low pressure you can see a
02:37little plot 966 millibars is what the model this is the European is
02:42forecasting. If that number increases it's a weakening storm. If it is
02:46strengthened if the number drops it's a strengthening storm. You're going to see
02:50some land interaction and it goes from 966 to 971 by Wednesday morning.
02:55Inevitably we'll see a little bit of weakening over the mountains of eastern
02:59and southeastern Cuba. Then we go from 971 to 965 that's restrengthening on the
03:04north side of Cuba. The land of the southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and
03:09Caicos very different from the Greater Antilles. The Greater Antilles have big
03:12mountains in Jamaica, Haiti we talked about an 8,700 foot mountain peak, 2,500 feet
03:18higher than anything in the eastern U.S. even higher than Mount Washington. Well as
03:22we take a look at the area around the southeastern Bahamas we've got some small
03:27scrappy islands that are low profile no big mountains. The larger islands like the
03:31Abacos and Grand Bahama they're way west of the storm. Thankfully also Nassau. By the
03:37way this is Nassau here I'm going to circle it. That's where about 280,000 people
03:40live. That's the bulk of the population of the Bahamas. Then another 30,000 or so up into
03:44this area. So there are some people who live down into Provo and parts of the
03:49Turks and Caicos and small settlements within the eastern Bahamas. But you'll
03:54notice 963, 970, 970, 970. So there is going to be some restrengthening
04:01971 to 963. They will restrengthen some after crossing the islands. I'm going to
04:06take you somewhere else here looking at top wind gusts. Take a look at this. These
04:11are in knots. Now the European model probably going to underrepresent the fiercest localized
04:16winds. These numbers are just plotted near larger cities. And you can see a 79 knot plot.
04:23Also a 99 knot plot for the present time. Those are knots. So we're looking at 99 becoming
04:28about 115 miles per hour. 79 hedging closer to about 92, 93 miles per hour knots. I'm going
04:34to zoom it out a little bit. I wanted to grab one of these. Look at this. An 80 knot forecast
04:39for wind gusts in Bermuda. So that would be about mid nineties, 93, 94 mile per hour wind
04:47gusts there in Bermuda. So there's still going to be some trouble with this. Let's take a
04:50look at the WaveWatch model. This is the WaveWatch 3 here. Your tax dollars at work. Kind
04:55of a cool thing here. You could see the wave heights and you get into the reds. That means
05:00open water. We could see wave heights 20 to 30 feet. And that's going to be a huge story.
05:0530 to 50 feet way out over the open water. By the way, we do have some disturbed weather with
05:09storm system number two off the east coast of the U.S. as we're going to be facing some
05:13waves of 12 feet plus off to the east side of the Outer Banks. Two more homes came into
05:18the water earlier this week. Earlier today, in fact, in the Outer Banks. We've got to keep
05:22an eye out. Perhaps, perhaps this trough could absorb our storm and sling some wind and rain
05:28into the Canadian Maritimes. And that is your forecast feed.
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