Hurricane Flossie

As busy as I have been with work in crisis the past two weeks, I really haven't been watching the tropics as closely as I usually do. With the exception of a few tropical waves brewing in the Atlantic and Caribbean so far this year has been relatively calm. That is not to say that things won't get more exciting now that we are in the more active part of the season.

In the Eastern Pacific I've seen a few named storms pop up on the NWS feed in the sidebar but nothing that has been too bad...until now.

Hurricane Flossie surprised me the other day when I saw that the storm intensified to hurricane level. If my memory serves, this is the first outright hurricane of the year. Then this morning I saw that Flossie has grown to a Cat 3 and now it is a Category 4.

This major storm is heading to just south of the Hawaiian Islands and is expected to weaken was it moves over cooler waters. Based on the predicted track of the storm and this expected weakening, Hawaii should only be affected by some of the outer bands and some really great surf.

Hang Ten, dudes.