Weird Hurricane Ophelia, And No End To California Fire Catastrophe

The National Hurricane Center has a strange forecast
track for Hurricane Ophelia. It could threaten Ireland. 

As we've watched the fires rage in California (I'll have an update further down in this post and the news is terrible) we also have another hurricane out in the Atlantic Ocean.

OPHELIA

Tropical Storm Ophelia strengthened into a hurricane yesterday and it's in a weird place. Ophelia is in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, well off the coast of Morocco, which is awfully far north and east for an Atlantic hurricane.

It's heading northeast, and oddly, could hit Ireland of all places. Ophelia will be transitioning from a tropical system to a plain old mid-latitude storm by the time it nears Ireland, but that doesn't make much of a difference as to what will happen.

Ophelia, or ex-Ophelia will be a very powerful storm once it blows by Ireland Monday or Tuesday, so we they are bracing for possible wind damage as gusts could easily exceed 80 mph on the Emerald Isle.

Although storms that are just completing transitions from hurricanes are rare in Great Britain, they have happened. According to the Category 6 weather blog, something like this happened in Ireland back in 1961, when Hurricane Debbie caused one of the most damaging wind storms in Irish history. Some sections of the country lost 25 percent of their trees with Debbie.

Ophelia has also tied another record for the Atlantic Basin. It's the 10th consecutive tropical storm that strengthened into a hurricane. That ties the record for the most consecutive hurricanes set in 1878, 1886 and 1893.

And remember, back in the 1800s, we didn't have satellites, so we might have missed a weaker tropical storm in between all the hurricanes that happened in those years.

So yeah, you can definitely say the 2017 hurricane season in the Atlantic has been pretty extreme. On the bright side, there's no immediate signs of any other new tropical storms or hurricanes forming in the Atlantic in the next seveal days.

CALIFORNIA FIRES

The situation with the wildfires in California just keeps getting worse and worse and the weather shows no signs of giving the state a break, at least through Saturday.

As expected, winds picked up and the humidity dropped in northern California yesterday and last night, and the fires resumed their rapid spread.

Wildfire destruction in Santa Rosa, California. Photo by Beth
Schlanker/Santa Rosa Press Democrat

At last check, the death toll had risen to 23, more people were missing and 3,500 homes have been destroyed. More homes are going to go.

Some of the fires are still completely out of control and all authorities can do at this point is try to evacuate people in the paths of the fires.

It's still breezy today, and after a slight lull in the winds tonight, it's going to get nearly as windy and dry Friday and Saturday as it was Sunday night, when the worst of the fires started.

Trouble is going to spread to the Los Angeles area, too, as hot, dry, strong Santa Ana winds are forecast to fan existing and new fires Friday and Saturday.

Back up in the San Francisco Bay Area, smoke from the fires has created an air quality crisis. Pollution levels set records in San Francisco and flights were delayed Wednesday for up to three hours due to the poor visibility in the smoke.