Update #10 Bill Kills/Mitch Wobble
Posted by Mike_Doran on 8/20/2009, 12:18 pm


It took awhile but the earth facing coronal hole finally produced and elevated solar wind speed and xray activity.  Presently the hole is gone--there is one on the top of the sun which is not earth directed.  But the timing could not be worse IMHO.  The solar wind started SO low that it hasn't gone over the 500 km/second levels that kills RI.  Instead it HAS produced the xray activity that clearly does cause tropical storms to organize more:



There has a been a bit of a theta E discussion. One idea is that the theta E connection requires something physically attached to the ocean and the ITCZ.  Bill however was connected to an area of South America along the ITCZ that had EXTREMELY heavy lightning last night:



Lightning at the present moment continues to be heavy regionally all around the storm.  Here is the latest real time image of the storm:



And some IR images:



SSTs paint a very very clear picture--if this storm tracks more west it runs over warmer oceans.  That plays into both heat content and conductivity:



Current models have been tracking this storm too far to the left.  The million (billion) dollar question is why and will this continue?
The answer to it IMHO has a lot to do with the so called Mitch wobble.

Mitch was a huge cat 5 storm that tracked south of the models.  No one has sufficiently explained what occurred with Mitch, why it slowed and turned left.  Until someone else fully explains Mitch's wobble, I think I have the best theory why.  And it goes back to something that happened 65 million years ago.

65 million years ago an asteroid struck the Yucatan.  300 thousand years later, everything on earth over 50 pounds was gone.  The asteroid didn't kill immediately.  It took TIME.  Plus the impact marks clearly a long term change in the earth you can clearly seen in the sediment layers that paleotologists study--the so called K-T boundary.  I would argue that the significant change that took place with the impact was not thermodynamic--but rather electrical.  That the impact liquified the earth surface down the the mantel, and created at first highly conductive pathway to the earth core and then later an organized pathway.  Even today you can see the magnetic field anomalies associated with the impact site and even today our largest storms like Gilbert and Wilma moved directly to the impact site--and Mitch wobbled right around it.  Thermodynamically, the heat from the impact site was about that of an El Nino--which the earth easily rids itself in a season.  But the conductivity pathway change is permanent and has influenced climate, IMHO, since the K-T boundary of time.  And that influence includes the biggest storms because they are extremely electrical in nature, and they are then attracted as a whole to the impact site.  And since the impact site is to the SW of Bill, it will and has tracked to the SW of the models, which do not pick up the global cloud microphysics and physical electrical changes that occur from an extreme electrical storm like Bill, especially in the context of the kind of space weather that is occurring right now with the coronal hole's elevated xray activity.

So my answer to this question is that the storm will continue to track left of the models.  Obviously, the models become more accurate with shorter prediction times, but in the long run the models will have errors to the right.

Mike
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An electrics discussion of the Atlantic twin A and B storms. - Mike_Doran, 8/16/2009, 1:33 am
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