Gustav is still a Category 3 Hurricane with sustained winds of 115mph.  We are expecting Gustav to make landfall during the late morning hours of Labor Day.  Some intensification is possible overnight before Gustav makes landfall.  We know this is a strong storm according to the wind speeds.  But it’s pretty interesting to look at the size of this storm.  The first satellite picture is Gustav at about 10pm.  The second satellite picture is Gustav at 10pm but with Colorado and surrounding state borders (it is to scale). 

 
This gives you an idea of how big this storm really is.  The distance between Colorado’s west state border and east state border is about 375 miles.  Gustav covers the whole state of Colorado and then some! 

As Stacey mentioned, it looks like Hurricane Gustav will make landfall at least as a Category 3 Hurricane. There’s a good chance it will make landfall as a Category 4. So what do the categories mean? Above is a list of the maximum sustained winds associated with each category. The real use of the categories, however, is to give an estimate of the potential damage and flooding that can be expected with the hurricane. If Gustav makes landfall as a Category 4, you can expect complete destruction of mobile homes, extensive damage to doors, windows and roofs and flooding of terrain lower than 10 feet below sea level. You can find a complete list of the damage associated with hurricanes by clicking here.

Hurricane Gustav is moving away from the west coast of Cuba and into the Central Gulf of Mexico by Sunday.  He’s looking to make landfall on the Northern Gulf Coast by Monday.  The storm is a Category 4 right now, but it looks like it could strenghthen into a Category 5 by the time it makes landfall.  Right now the projected path has Gustav making landfall in the New Orleans area. 

 
A second tropical system is brewing right now.  This is Tropical Storm Hanna.  Hanna has sustained winds of about 50mph, but strengthening is forecast over the next couple of days.  Hanna is moving toward the NNW at about 8mph and is expected to near or just NE of the Turks and Caicos Islands late Sunday or Monday.  Looking at the longterm projected path, this storm could effect southern portions of Florida, or move into the Gulf.

It’s a little difficult to see from this picture, but if you look closely you can see some hot air balloons in the right portion of the image. As you can see, this morning turned out to be a beautiful start to the Annual Colorado Balloon Classic. Pilots told us that the weather was perfect for this morning’s launches. Winds were fairly calm and there was plenty of sunshine as opposed to the low level clouds and fog we thought could affect the balloon flights. Winds are expected to pick up this afternoon, but here’s hoping they die down this evening for the Balloon Glo.

I don’t remember if it was in the half hour before the 5pm newscast today or during the 5 o’clock, but there was a storm in Custer/Huerfano County that had a severe thunderstorm warning on it and at one point I remember mentioning on air that “this storm is rotating and I’ll continue to track it closely here over the next 10 minutes” or something to that extent. The storm at this point had several features that made me make this statement. An inflow notch and a bit of a hook echo showed both storm organization and some rotation on reflectivity (I wish I would’ve captured an image). Also present on velocity was a well defined couplet, an area of wind moving away from the radar (this was the inflow region of the storm) and an area of wind moving toward the storm (this was at the rear and was the downdraft portion of the storm). As you can see above, I’m glad I mention on-air that the storm was rotating and (hindsight is always 20/20) a tornado warning probably should’ve been issued for the storm. One reason the NWS probably didn’t is that the storms were “pulsing” at this point. They were going up, briefly maturing and then collapsing within a 40 minute time frame. This funnel lasted around 5 minutes per the reports I received. Thanks to the Terry Mathews for sending the pictures!

Through 8pm thunderstorms were where we expected them to be…from I-25 into the foothills. As the sun set, these storms would have come to an end….EXCEPT…as the storms in and around Trinidad collapsed, they produced a significant outflow boundary of rain cooled air. This outflow boundary was running into A LOT of low level moisture as it moved northeast, notice the dewpoints above 60 degrees from La Junta eastward at 7pm.

This air was moving back toward the foothills and as it collided with the outflow boundary, produced some thunderstorms from Manzanola on an arc to the northwest into southern El Paso County where several football games, including Mesa Ridge vs. Mitchell, to be suspended whle the storm moved overhead. Here’s what it looked like on the Neighborhood Weather Network in Fountain around 9:30.

While the storms in El Paso County died out through our 10PM newscast (where one of my weather computers decided to start the holiday weekend a little early) the storms on the plains keep riding the outflow and the moisture moving in from the east continue to support storm capable of producing penny to nickel sized hail. There have been severe thunderstorm warnings on these eastern cells and here I sit at midnight waiting to start my three day weekend.

Variability is more normal here than not, and here is just a small sampling of the variability we had out there this morning as viewed from Cripple Creek and Monument…

The low level moisture responsible for the grunge over I-25 this morning wasn’t deep enough to wash over Woodland Park or Cripple Creek this morning.  A few areas had some showers, there was even a little thunder out there.  Clouds weren’t as thick over Pueblo or Pueblo West though at times is was cloudy this morning.  We expect more low clouds and/or fog Saturday morning, to me this just represents the gradual end to summer, sigh…

The Balloon Classic may again have some weather related issues.  The wind will predominantly blow from the south or southeast which makes it tough for them to launch.  They like to be able to drift to the southeast towards open land in order to make safe landings.  The low clouds tomorrow morning aren’t going to help either.  The Balloon Glow requires the wind to be low, and each of the next several afternoons will be quite windy at times.  Saturday and Sunday the wind will let up some during the evening hours but I’m not sure how quickly.  Monday the wind may keep rolling into the night as the next cold front approaches…

I caught fireworks from Invesco in a timelapse I was running after Barack Obama’s speech. I was trying to catch the Interstate re-opening, but it didn’t work. Oh well, I ended up with this instead!

The next cold front whipped through here this morning and kicked up quite a bit of wind as it did.  We’ve recorded peak wind gusts over the STOMRTRACKER 13 Neighborhood Weather Network between 35 and 40 mph on the east side of Colorado Springs.  As we move deeper into September cold fronts like this will be more common and so will the wind associated with them.  STORMTRACKER 13 LIVE HD Doppler is sensitive enough to pick up the position of the cold front even though the sky is clear, check out the image below.  Within the area of “ground clutter” notice the subtle, but present enhancement approaching I-25 near Colorado Springs and extending southeastward towards Lamar. 

This indicates the leading edge of the cooler air blowing across the area today.  A cold front kicked up the wind yesterday too, but the cooler airmass was shallow enough that it slid over and out of the area allowing us to warm more than expected yesterday.  The airmass today is deeper, one of the indicators of that depth is pressure.  at 10:00 AM yesterday the pressure at the Colorado Springs Airport was 30.12 inches of mercury and it was holding steady, at the same time today it is 30.19 and still rising.  The higher number indicates that the air overhead weighs more than it did yesterday.  Colder air is heavier than warmer air, and so the colder the air and the more of it you have, the higher the pressures will be.  The pressure rises this morning indicate that the new airmass continues to build over the area, wheras a steady or falling pressure might indicate that the influx of cooler air had peaked or was beginning to drain away from the area.  We don’t have any good way to directly measure the depth of a colder airmass, but we can infer some things from the pressure readings that we get.  Bottom line is that today’s cold front is stronger than yesterday’s.  Yesterday’s high temperatures of 84 and 89 for Colorado Springs and Pueblo respectively will not be reached again today, and by tomorrow morning the effects of this cold front may be more noticeable…

On a simpler note we have some pretty sunrise shots to look at.  We were able to grab some live video fom our sister station KMGH of the sunrise in Denver as viewed from their news helicopter…

The STORMTRACKER 13 Neighborhood Weather Network shows us the others…

This storm may end up being the big tropical story of 2008, and while only time will reveal that answer, the hurricane that made landfall on Hispaniola today has potential to become a major hurricane. As it moves northwest over the next couple of days it will move over some of the warmest water in the Gulf of Mexico/Carribean Sea…temperatures running around 86 to 86.5 degrees fahrenheit, perfect for growing/intensifying hurricanes. The forecasted track to the northwest will also move the storm around the periphery of an area of high pressure centered near Florida and keep wind shear at a level that will not stop the storm from strengthening.

While the accuracy of hurricane strength forecasts in the 3 to 5 day time frame is very low, the folks at the National Hurricane Center that know a lot more about tropical meteorology than I do, are pretty confident that this storm will be a major hurricane (cat3 - cat5) when it spends some time over the Gulf late in the weekend. If you have interests along the Gulf Coast you should closely monitor forecasts for this storm. I’ll continue to track it here on the blog (and on our newscasts of course!) and we’ll see how accurate this current forecast/path ends up.

This storm holds personal interest for me. You may recall I was gone for a few days around August 15th, when my brother Geoff married his wife Shannon, in New Orleans. Shannon grew up there, her family still lives there and she and my brother move there from Phoenix early next week. While I’ve told my brother I’m going to visit him for a cat. 1 or cat. 2 hurricane landfall in that area, I am not visiting for a major hurricane and hope he is not there for it either! Stay tuned!