People in the Florida Keys are putting up hurricane shutters and wooden boards on homes and businesses as powerful Hurricane Irma approaches the Caribbean on a path that could take it to the U.S. The dike has been undergoing a $1.7 billion improvement plan that should be finished in the mid-2020s. Failures of the original embankments during hurricanes in 19 killed over 3,000 people when waters flooded neighboring towns. Most of current dike was built in the 1960s. The corps tries to keep the lake below 16 feet and worries about the stability of the Hoover Dike, which surrounds the lake, if it exceeds 18 feet. The corps says Irma could add a foot of water directly to the lake as it passes and then 3 feet of runoff in the coming weeks. Spokesman John Campbell said Tuesday the plan is to drain the lake for three days to drop its current level of almost 14 feet.
Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from Florida’s Lake Okeechobee in preparation for Hurricane Irma’s expected arrival in the state this weekend. territory’s northeast coast will feel the brunt. In addition, Irma now contains slightly more IKE in its wind field than did Hurricane Katrina on Augahead of its landfall on the Gulf Coast.įor more information on RMS HWind, RMS clients can consult their account representatives for details on the latest RMS HWind updates.Rossello says the winds of the Category 5 storm will lash Culebra island around dawn Wednesday and move to Puerto Rico shortly afterward. This amount is several times greater the values found in both Hurricanes Charley and Andrew, which are two of the most recent storms to strike the Florida Peninsula with a comparable intensity to Irma. Our 21:00 UTC Friday HWind analysis indicates that the IKE in Irma’s wind field has increased to approximately 125 Terajoules (TJ). Therefore, strong winds and heavy rains will still reach areas in the southeastern part of the state, where the center is seemingly less like to pass.Īs a measure of storm size and surge destructive potential, RMS HWind uses a unique Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE) metric. As of 21:00 UTC on Friday, hurricane force winds extend outwards almost 90 nautical miles from the storm’s center. Regardless of the ultimate track, each of the highlighted scenarios would bring Irma’s large wind field across the vast majority of the state.
However, a less likely outcome remains, wherein Irma remains just offshore in the eastern Gulf of Mexico making an eventual landfall in northern Florida. In fact, model guidance suggests that both Key West and Fort Myers have a 70 percent chance or greater of Irma passing within 50 nautical miles of either city. Few, if any, reasonable outcomes exist that do not include a direct landfall in the state of Florida.īased on the probabilities in the shaded density data, the most likely landfall location in the state falls between the southernmost tip of the peninsula and the Tampa metropolitan area, including the Florida Keys. Any interactions with Cuba would likely weaken the hurricane prior to making landfall in the United States. The hurricane’s most likely path takes it west-northwest along northern Cuba before turning north through the Florida Keys towards Florida’s Gulf Coast. With Irma tracking west-northwest, closer to the United States, the forecast guidance has started to converge on a solution that is to the west of Thursday’s forecast track. This new proprietary track forecast probability product from RMS HWind provides unique insight into the likelihood of where a storm might go, to help deliver insights beyond what is available from public sources.įigure 1: Hurricane Irma forecast storm track probabilities and deterministic scenarios, initialized Friday, September 8 at 12:00 UTC The latest track probability analysis of the current model forecasts has been released by the RMS HWind team, based on forecast models initialized at 12:00 UTC Friday, September 8. Michael Kozar, senior modeler – Model Development, RMS
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