Tropical Cyclone Fantala stalled north of Madagascar on Monday and it weakened below Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.\u00a0 At 8:00 p.m. EDT on Monday the center of Tropical Cyclone Fantala was located at latitude 9.2\u00b0S and longitude 49.6\u00b0E which put it about 200 miles (320 km) north of Antsira\u00f1ana, Madagascar.\u00a0 Fantala was nearly stationary.\u00a0 The maximum sustained wind speed was 140 m.p.h. (220 km\/h) and there were wind gusts to 165 m.p.h. (265 km\/h).\u00a0 The minimum surface pressure was 933 mb.<\/p>\n
The structure of the circulation of Tropical Cyclone Fantala deteriorated on Monday.\u00a0 An eye was no longer visible in satellite imagery and the ring of thunderstorms that was around the eye appeared to have a gap on the east side.\u00a0 There were still bands of thunderstorms spiraling around the outer portion of the circulation.\u00a0 However, it appeared that some drier air may have been pulled into the northeastern part of Fantala.\u00a0 Thunderstorms were still generating upper level divergence, but it was mainly to the south of the tropical cyclone.\u00a0 The upper level divergence pumped out less mass than the amount of mass that converged in the lower levels and the surface pressure rose about 20 mb on Monday.<\/p>\n
The environment around Tropical Cyclone Fantala contains a mixture of favorable and unfavorable features.\u00a0 Fantala is over water where the Sea Surface Temperatures are near 29\u00b0C.\u00a0 Upper level winds are blowing a little more strongly from the northeast, but the vertical wind shear is still not too significant.\u00a0 Fantala does seem to be pulling in some drier air into its circulation.\u00a0 The tropical cyclone is nearly stationary and its strong winds may be mixing some cooler water to the surface.\u00a0 Drier air and cooler water would reduce the energy available to drive the circulation of Fantala and it is likely to weaken further on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Fantala is in an area where the steering currents are weak and it may not move much during the next 12 to 24 hours.\u00a0 Eventually, a ridge is expected to develop northeast of Fantala and start to steer the tropical cyclone toward the southeast.\u00a0 On its anticipated track the core of strongest winds would pass north of Madagascar.\u00a0 However, there is still uncertainty about the future track of Fantala and it could still have an impact on northern Madagascar.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tropical Cyclone Fantala stalled north of Madagascar on Monday and it weakened below Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.\u00a0 At 8:00 p.m. EDT on Monday the center of Tropical Cyclone Fantala was located at latitude 9.2\u00b0S and longitude 49.6\u00b0E which put it about 200 miles (320 km) north of Antsira\u00f1ana, Madagascar.\u00a0 Fantala was nearly stationary.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,2],"tags":[350,84,85,74,351,355,354,349],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354"}],"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=2354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2355,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions\/2355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}