Warm water friend, Topography Foe.

by Mike Godsey, mike AT iwindsurf.com

Hurricane Newton has been sliding up Baja’s Sea of Cortez the last few days and passed near La Ventana and Los Barriles will few reports of damage despite strong winds and heavy rain.

Recent years have seen unprecedented numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes curving off of coastal Mexico and passing towards Hawaii or Baja. All this hurricane action is fed by the unusually warm pacific waters in recent years. (you may be wondering why the Atlantic has had a hurricane drought the last decade. That is a complex but understood topic and maybe one of our east coast meteorologist will cover that in a blog.)

The genesis of hurricanes is a top far beyond the scope of this short blog but one face we know for sure. Warm ocean water is a major factor the creation of hurricanes and when a hurricane moves from the tropics to more temperate waters it usually fades fast.

And land is a major foe of hurricanes. It not as consistently warm are tropical waters so it provides less energy and hills and mountains create far more friction that the oceans surface. So topography quickly weakens the hurricanes winds.

In this model animation you can see how fast hurricane Newton si modeled to dies once it leaves the pacific and the Sea of Cortez.