Hurricane Dolly brought 100mph winds and up to 20 inches of rain as she made landfall 35 miles north of Brownsville, Texas around 1pm CDT. Near-hurricane force winds continue throughout the evening. Floods could be the lasting impact of this season's first major landfall.
What's next? The tropics look calm with a large tropical wave in the far Eastern Atlantic. The NHC says there's less than a 20% probablility of tropical depression development with this wave over the next several days.
Hurricane warnings are posted from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and the televison crews are flooding the beaches of South Padre Island. Forecasters don't expect much more than a category 1 or 2 at best, but the warm waters of the gulf can do strange things to wandering storms.
Rain could be the real story here with localized amounts of up to 15 inches.
Storm surges are predicted to 3-6 feet. Check out our VBlog on storm surges in the video window below. Meanwhile we'll watch the storm as it makes landfall Wednesday in extreme southeast Texas.
Cristobal heads out to the North Atlantic, no longer impacting land. Bertha is just a memory.
We just received the 70th and final advisory from the NHC on Bertha as she's officially gone extra-tropical over the North Atlantic. Bertha was the longest lasting July Atlantic storm on record. Is this a mark of what's to come?
Cristobal is skirting the East Coast, bringing well-needed rain to the parched southeast. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it'll drop enough moisture to break the drought conditions as it parallel's the east coast of the US on it's way north. Best guesses keep this out to sea with some squalls and heavy surf along the Eastern Seaboard.
Dolly
is expected to impact the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico as a tropical storm before
passing into the warm and open waters of the Gulf. Interests in Texas should
keep an eye on this storm. The five-day cone has the storm crossing the US/Mexican
border as a full-blown hurricane on Wednesday. We'll need to keep a close eye
on Cristobal.
Looks like we could be in for another busy season.
It's now looking more and more like we will get our first hurricane of the 2008 season. The National Hurricane Center now forecasts tropical storm Bertha to reach wind speeds in excess of 75mph and become a hurricane within the next day or so. Wind shear should be light and sea surface temperatures warmer allowing for the upgrade. But it also seems likely the storm will begin to curve to the northwest and eventually north and finally back to the northeast before it reaches any land. Models are now coming into much better agreement in calling for the curve to sea before getting anywhere near the US.
So it seems the name "Bertha" will again bring a hurricane, but one that falls short of being retired. The last hurricane Bertha struck the US coast in North Carolina in July 1996. It was expected to be a fairly weak, cat 1 storm as it neared shore, but intensified before landfall to a a near Cat 3 hurricane. The name Bertha was used again in 2002, btw. -JF- READ OUR ARCHIVE FROM 2005 - 2007 HERE >>
HurricaneNow co-founder Tom Casale covered hurricane Bertha in 1996 on assignment for CNN and remembers a tricky storm that packed more punch that first forecast...one that made for some interesting television.
Here are Tom's recollections:
It was probably smart for
the Weather Channel crew to give us their rooms in the two-story motel just
yards off the beach and Mercer Pier in Wrightsville Beach, NC.
They sped away too fast for us to change our minds. We anticipated Bertha's
landfall as a category 1 and felt fairly safe in this old concrete structure.
Four hours later the gusts of the storm began to blow out the motel windows one loud crash at a time. Beneath us the ocean poured across the dunes as we quickly lost the only escape route. Our only connection to the mainland now was was a radio and cellphone with dying batteries. Another hour later the ground floor was filled with three feet of salt water, the winds were blowing in excess of 110 MPH, and the Mercer Pier had broken into dozens of pieces, the largest of which were smashing into the pilings of the motel, shaking the entire structure with each smash.
We were stuck. All bridges and roads to the mainland were closed and travel on the city streets was ridiculous. We looked around the motel to find a 'just in case' way out. We scoped out some ropes and cables to secure ourselves in case things got really rough.
The four of us huddled in the room while Jeff Flock filed reports to Atlanta from the cellphone. The radio (and the CNN anchor) encouraged us to find shelter- thanks. We listened to the winds calm as the eye approached. It gave us a chance to venture down to the garage to find our vehicles floating and the ocean flowing like a river through the main street feet away.
The backside of the storm brought a shift of the winds, still gusty enough to blow out the windows on the opposite side of the motel. Now the only dry (and safe) haven in the motel was a small dark area in the hallway, next to the melting ice machine. We took stock of our gear, took turns dozing , and shot video every 30-minutes or so throughout the rest of the night to save a chronology of the storm. By sunrise the winds were calm. We were exhausted, sandblasted and soaked.
At 6am we ventured into what was the main street outside the motel. We looked up. Almost every window in the hotel was smashed, more than 3 feet of sand replaced the ocean water in the garage and our cars were curiosly parked by the tide. The entire Mercer Pier was littered across the beach and thoughout our garage.
Slowly the other residents wandered into the streets like zombies, surprised by the fury of the storm that grew much larger than anyone predicted.