Hurricane Joaquin intensified to Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale on Thursday and it brought strong winds and floods to some of the islands of the Bahamas.\u00a0 At 11:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday the center of Hurricane Joaquin was located at latitude 22.9\u00b0N and longitude 74.6\u00b0W which put it about 20 miles (32 km) east-southeast of Clarence Town on Long Island in the Central Bahamas and about 810 miles (1310 km) south of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.\u00a0 Joaquin was moving toward the west at 3 m.p.h. (5 km\/h).\u00a0 The maximum sustained wind speed was 130 m.p.h. (210 km\/h) and there were wind gusts to 160 m.p.h. (260 km\/h).\u00a0 The minimum surface pressure was 935 mb.\u00a0 The Hurricane Intensity Index (HII) was 25.1.\u00a0 The Hurricane Size Index (HSI) was 21.4 and the Hurricane Wind Intensity Size Index (HWISI) was 46.5.<\/p>\n
A Hurricane Warning has been issued for the Central Bahamas including Cat Island, Rum Cay, the Exumas, Long Island and San Salvador.\u00a0\u00a0 A Hurricane Warning has been issued for the Northwestern Bahamas including the Abacos, Berry Islands, Eleuthera, Grand Bahama Island and New Providence.\u00a0 A Hurricane Watch has been issued for Bimini and Andros Island.\u00a0 A Tropical Storm Warning has been issued for Andros Island and the Southeastern Bahamas including the Acklins, Crooked Island, Long Cay, the Ragged Islands, the Inaguas, Mayaguana and the Turks and Caicos.\u00a0 A Tropical Storm Warning has been issued for the Cuban provinces of Camaguey, Los Tunas, Holguin and Guantanamo.<\/p>\n
The eye in Hurricane Joaquin contracted on Thursday and it has only been visible intermittently on conventional satellite imagery.\u00a0 The intensity of the hurricane appears to have stabilized in recent hours.\u00a0 While the intensity of Joaquin has been constant, the circulation has increased in sized and hurricane force winds now extend out about 50 miles (80 km) from the center.\u00a0 Joaquin is still generating upper level divergence which seems to be pumping out as much mass as is converging in the lower levels of the circulation.\u00a0 As a result, the pressure has also remained fairly steady during the past few hours.\u00a0 There is not much vertical wind shear and the overall environment would seems to support further intensification.\u00a0 However, the slow movement of Joaquin may be causing it to stir cooler water to the surface, which will reduce the energy available to the hurricane.<\/p>\n
Hurricane Joaquin has moved little during the past six hours.\u00a0 An narrow ridge is blocking its motion and the ridge is preventing it from moving toward the north.\u00a0 A large upper level trough over the eastern U.S. is expected to weaken the ridge on Friday.\u00a0 The upper level trough is expected to steer Joaquin toward the north on Friday.\u00a0 Most of the reliable numerical models predict that the trough will carry Joaquin toward the northeast during the weekend and that it will stay east of the U.S.\u00a0 A couple of other models still suggest a landfall could occur, but they are outliers at the current time.\u00a0 Until Hurricane Joaquin makes the turn toward the north and northeast, it could still pose a potential risk to the U.S., but that possibility is much less than it was 24 hours ago.\u00a0 Joaquin will continue to bring high winds and floods to parts of the Bahamas on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hurricane Joaquin intensified to Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale on Thursday and it brought strong winds and floods to some of the islands of the Bahamas.\u00a0 At 11:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday the center of Hurricane Joaquin was located at latitude 22.9\u00b0N and longitude 74.6\u00b0W which put it about 20 miles (32 km) east-southeast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[208,205,31,145,211,215,216,97,139],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1683,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions\/1683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}