I'm worried about my hubby's cousins who live in Playa Del Carmen, MX. Rina is supposed to hit as a Cat 3. That's scary. Hoping that there won't be too much damage to the resorts because Rivera Maya is my vacation spot!!!
It seems the hurricane is down to Category 1, or even lower, so it seems they will be no damage or just a bit.
Put a fork in it: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-t...-ends-without-a-lot-of-hurricanes-2299307.php If this keeps up, hurricane season may need a new name. Although a stray storm remains possible, the Atlantic hurricane season will end Wednesday with a very large number of named storms, 18. But fewer than 40 percent of those storms, only seven, reached hurricane strength. "The year started out with eight consecutive tropical storms that failed to reach hurricane strength, the first time on record the Atlantic has seen that many storms in a row not reach hurricane strength," said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and co-founder of The Weather Underground. Typically, about 55 percent to 60 percent of named storms reach hurricane strength in a given year. Since 1981, when satellites began to track storm activity around the world, scientists have measured a slight decline in the number of annual hurricanes, from an average of just more than 50 to about 45. Could it be a welcome trend? "The record is not long enough or of high enough quality to make any conclusions yet," Masters said. "It is interesting to note that recent research is increasingly pointing to a prediction that the strongest storms will get stronger, but that the total number of global tropical cyclones should decrease in a warming climate." Inconsistent record A senior hurricane scientist, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agrees there's not enough data to draw conclusions about hurricane activity. Even during the past 30 years, he said, there are inconsistencies in the hurricane record. In the Atlantic, he said, hurricane hunters fly into storms to get direct measures of wind speed and central pressures. However, across most other basins in the Pacific and Indian oceans, the intensity of storms is often estimated from satellite photos, an imprecise method. "There are serious problems with the hurricane record, and I don't unfortunately see an end to those," Emanuel said. These inconsistencies in the storm record, as well as the relatively low number of the most powerful hurricanes each year, he said, make it difficult to determine whether the values are actually changing, let alone attributing that change to natural variability or climate change. As for this year in the Atlantic, it was busy whether a lot of hurricanes formed or not. This year's 18 named storms trail only five seasons, 2005 (28 named storms), 1933 (21), and 2010, 1995 and 1887 with 19 storms, for the most in a given year. The combination of near-record sea surface temperatures in the region of the Atlantic Ocean where storms form, but unusually dry, stable air over the ocean helped produce a large number of named storms, but comparatively few hurricanes, meteorologists say. On average there are 11 named storms during a hurricane season, with six becoming hurricanes. Seasonal forecasters, such as Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University, were very close on their predictions for named storms (Klotzbach called for 17), but overshot the mark on hurricanes. In his forecast Klotzbach predicted nine hurricanes for 2011. "There was somewhat stronger wind shear and more intrusions of dry air into the deep tropics than we were expecting with our seasonal outlooks," Klotzbach said. Steered away Despite the large number of systems, only two named storms hit the United States this year: Tropical Storm Lee, which hit Louisiana with 60 mph winds, and Hurricane Irene, which hit North Carolina on Aug. 27 with 85 mph winds. Although Irene lashed the northeastern United States, statistically the country again did very well. Masters noted that, during the 15-year active hurricane period from 1995 to 2009, one-third of all named storms in the Atlantic hit the United States. During the past two years just three have, or 8 percent of named storms. "Favorable steering currents steered most of the storms in 2010 and 2011 past Bermuda and out to sea," Masters said. May such a trend continue.
