00:00Well, here on the forecast feed this Friday evening, we are taking a quick and close look
00:05at Lala, the tropical storm that is gradually strengthening in the big picture as it approaches
00:11the southern end of the Big Island of Hawaii. The Big Island of Hawaii, amazingly, this may
00:17surprise some of you, it has officially not ever, at least in the recent modern era, the past 100
00:24plus years, had an official landfalling hurricane cross the Big Island. In fact, it's very rare
00:32that we see storms cross, the center of the storms cross the Big Island of Hawaii. A lot
00:37of them stay south or divert to the east in a weakening state. So it's a pretty rare atmospheric
00:43event for storms to come in and actually make landfall. Now, admittedly, even the Big Island
00:47is a small target for the absolute center of the storm to cross over. And just two years
00:54ago, we had Hone, a very powerful storm, a hurricane. The center of it technically passed about 50
01:01miles south of the Big Island. So this, and even Aniki technically did not make landfall
01:08on the Big Island, but it had huge impacts. So sometimes it's about the northern eyewall,
01:12even if the center of the storm may pass to the south. You could have, you could be in the
01:17northern eyewall and it not officially be a landfall. So we're looking at the center
01:20of the storm. So it's somewhat an artifact of statistics and so forth. But before I leave
01:24that graphic here, I wanted to show you that we have had a couple of storms that were tropical
01:30storms across in somewhat recent years. Esel in 2014 and Darby in 2016. But there were tropical
01:37storms that crossed the Big Island of Hawaii. And we're going to be dealing with a very near
01:42pass or perhaps a direct landfall from La La. So here's our official forecast here at
01:46Rocky weather. And we are expecting this to continue to strengthen. And it may late tonight
01:51or early tomorrow become, these are in Hawaiian time, so it'd be 8 a.m. Eastern time, 2 a.m.
01:58Hawaiian time, become a hurricane. And it'll be very close to a landfall on the south side
02:04of the Big Island. Before I look at our forecast impact graphics, I'm going to bring us into
02:09the world of the modeling and some of the rationale behind this. So here we are with the big view.
02:15We are zoomed way out over the Pacific. And just for perspective, here is California, Oregon,
02:21Washington. We got Seattle. We have San Francisco, way up to the northeastern side of that. And
02:28here's Hawaii. There's Hawaii. Okay. So as we look at the steering flow around this, one of the big
02:34influences and perhaps the biggest influence is a large high pressure system off to the north,
02:40north-northwest, that is producing the steering flow around this ridge. So on the northeast side,
02:48you have this flow from the south. That's actually ultimately burying this other tropical storm in a
02:53weaker state to the south. But, oh nay, on the south side of the ridge, it's being driven basically west
03:00to east, toward the west and west-northwest from the east-southeast. So being driven to the west-northwest.
03:06And you can see, here's the upper level flow. And you can see the vorticity, the bright colors spin
03:13Saturday evening, Saturday night, right over the Big Island in the GFS. Here's the European,
03:18very close to and maybe clipping. Let's go down to the surface to see how this all plays out in
03:23just a
03:24minute. We're going to do that in a minute. But before we get there, I wanted to acknowledge two
03:27things on the northwestern fringe of the storm. So I'm going to find Hawaii again. And admittedly,
03:32there's a lot of color on this map. Here's Hawaii. I'm going to circle it. That's Hawaii. And here's
03:39our storm. There it is. This is a look at wind shear. And there is some wind shear over Hawaii.
03:46I'm going to clear that and just redraw the shear. And there's a little bit of a wind shear that
03:54may keep
03:55its intensity and check if it wobbles too far to the north. Another thing to keep an eye on,
04:01there is a tremendous amount of moisture with the storm itself, but we're on the edge of some drier
04:07air. It was very dry air, but now the blues counterintuitively are actually drier. And the
04:13maroons are abundant moisture. Earlier, there was very dry air to the northwest of the storm. Now,
04:17it's moderately dry air on the northwestern fringe of the footprint of the storm. But it's big enough,
04:22it's strong enough that it's actually producing its own moisture and sending that into its path
04:26here to the northwest. So again, the moisture is not really helping it to the northwest strengthen
04:31much. It's moderately dry air northwest. There's moderate wind shear over the islands,
04:36but the storm is just southeast of those locations. So it's still in a posture of likely strengthening.
04:41All right, let's take a look at this surface circulation. And here you can see the GFS resumed
04:47in tight now. This would make a landfall. This would be a landfalling storm with the GFS
04:52as it would jog kind of into the Big Island from the southeast. And then it would continue to move
04:58northwest, weakening after land interaction. Here's the European. The European comes in,
05:03and even though it's initially farther south, it actually would make a landfall of the European,
05:09clipping the south end of the Big Island as a strengthening tropical storm becoming a hurricane.
05:14Here's the NAM. The NAM actually has a higher grid resolution. This decisively brings it in as a
05:21hurricane. The NAM would be the first time in the modern era with a landfalling hurricane in the Big
05:26Island. That'd be a big hit. And then the Canadian resumed out a little bit more. And this would be
05:34a
05:34real close pass, a real close pass into, in fact, I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to do a
05:41zoom and
05:41bring up the, this is the UK Met. So the Canadian, I'm going to bring up the Canadian, makes a
05:47real
05:47close pass on the south side. And then the UK Met, I'm going to zoom a little south, the UK
05:54Met
05:55would also bring that close contour in as a landfalling tropical storm, probably in the UK
06:01Mets world. All right, here we have a forecast of very strong winds. And in that whitish color,
06:06you're seeing winds that are in knots, around 75 plus knots. That's about 85 to 90 miles per hour
06:11for the area near landfall. And tremendous amounts of rain. You get up into the deep blues and we're
06:17looking at over a foot of rain. So let's go to our forecast graphics to close this out. We're
06:23forecasting gusts of wind of 80 to 100 miles per hour on the far southern tip of the Big Island.
06:29We're also forecasting some very heavy rain. We're forecasting over a foot of rain for most of
06:34the eastern half of the island. And somebody near landfall, or just north of there, or on the east
06:39facing slopes of the volcanoes there, in the mountains, could get closer to that AccuWeather
06:43local storm max of up to 30 inches of rain. Dangerous rip currents up and down all the island chain.
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