A strengthening Hurricane Blas likely won’t have much impact on Hawaii except possible high surf arriving during the weekend on the island’s eastern shores.
A strengthening Hurricane Blas likely won’t have much impact on Hawaii except possible high surf arriving during the weekend on the island’s eastern shores.
Blas is forecast to dissipate to a remnant low just more than 1,000 miles east of Hilo on Sunday morning as it heads westward, said Tom Birchard, a hurricane specialist with the National Weather Service in Honolulu. That means the brunt of the effects should stay well away from the islands.
“Blas in undergoing a period of rapid intensification and it is moving along a track that could produce some surf Saturday, Sunday and even into Monday in the advisory levels around 8 foot,” Birchard said. “But this isn’t wind chop. It’s long period swell with a lot of energy in it.”
This first major hurricane for the Eastern Pacific and other activity in the basin means the season is now off and running, and the cyclone shouldn’t be completely discounted, Birchard said.
“There’s always the caveat that we don’t want people to tune out,” he said. “There are inherent errors in any hurricane forecast.”
Located 2,300 miles east of the Big Island, Blas blew up to a Category 3 cyclone Tuesday, with 125 mph winds and a 23-mile wide eye. The storm was expected to reach peak strength this morning as a Category 4 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph before beginning to slowly degrade.
The wind shear, which works to tear cyclones apart, is light along the forecast track, and water temperature will play the determining role in the hurricane’s strength. Most of the weather models are in good agreement that its current course to the west-northwest will take the cyclone into waters in the 75-degree range toward the weekend. That’s not warm enough to provide the heat the hurricane’s thermal engines need to keep churning.
But just a little farther south, the water temperature jumps to 79 degrees. One European weather model that is out of agreement with the rest takes Blas on a more southerly track through those waters and well south of the Big Island as a system still holding onto tropical cyclone strength.
Another system forming behind Blas likely will intensify into a tropical cyclone by the weekend.
The season has gotten off to a slow start, Birchard said, but with the formation of Tropical Storm Agatha last week, Blas this week, and a new super typhoon in the Western Pacific, “our long-lived hurricane drought is over,” he said.
Email Bret Yager at byager@westhawaiitoday.com.