Loading ...“Is it on some kind of track?”
ABSOLUTELY! Like the midwest up the Mississippi valley is a ‘Tornado Alley”, Hawaii is literally like the bowling pins at the end of ‘Hurricane Alley’ of the Eastern Pacific. We are located just south of the tropics line, but just north of the “ITCZ”… that weather zone called the “Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone” where all the thunderstorms boil away. So these air masses slide west off of Mexico and start spinning up in the ITCZ, flinging west and arcing slightly to the north edge of the ITCZ aiming for… Hawaii.
Fortunately it is a very big ocean, and most of them miss us or die out first. But we always gotta watch. Over the years here I have learned (and this is an old Hawaiian legend that Hawaii Island is ‘protected’ from hurricanes) that incoming storms will turn aside on approach. Twice I have seen direct-hit incoming storms ‘bounce’ back and turn either north or south of the Big Island. We are a huge, massive atmospheric wall of two 14,000 ft mountains that simply will not allow a hurricane to pass over. Those that pass too close have their circulating moisture bands torn apart by the mountains. I expect this to happen to DOUGLAS on Sunday. We are used to getting a lot of water on the windward Big Island. Some of the most spectacular waterfalls anywhere…. sometimes falling right out of the sky!!