Hurricane Felix Heads for Honduras - 05.08.07

Small but very powerful, Hurricane Felix is heading for a sparsely populated part of Central America.  At this stage Texas looks safe. 

Hurricane Felix passed close to the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao on 2 September and passed 50 miles north of the northernmost island in the chain, Aruba. Heavy rains were reported on all three islands, but reported damage is minimal.

Hurricane Felix became incredibly ferocious on 3 September, and wound up into a small but potentially very dangerous Category 5 hurricane. Felix now holds the record for the shortest time for an Atlantic storm to intensify to Category 5 strength. Felix took just 51 hours to reach Category 5 strength after it had formed as a tropical depression. That is remarkable  considering most tropical cyclones take 3-5 days to develop into a Category 1 hurricane. The tracking coordinates for Felix show that it has spent more of its life at Category 5 strength than any other classification.

Although Hurricane Felix has intensified into a potentially catastrophic hurricane, the prospects of a major flooding catastrophe in Honduras and Nicaragua are much lower now  than they were.  First, the dramatic intensification cycle has spun Felix into a very small, tight coil. A storm of this small size is much less likely to pull in moisture from the Pacific Ocean over the mountains of Honduras like Hurricane Fifi of 1974 did. Secondly, the strong ridge of high pressure pushing Felix westward has intensified, resulting in a powerful forward speed for the hurricane. Felix is now moving at 21 mph, and is not expected to slow much during its passage over Honduras. This will keep rainfall amounts lower than expected. Thirdly, it now appears likely that Felix will hit the Honduras/Nicaragua border area, a very sparsely populated region known as "The Mosquito Coast". The region is mostly a large expanse of marshy wetlands.

This track will result in the rapid weakening of Felix, limiting the rainfall from the storm. A passage just north of Honduras would have been far more disastrous. It will still be bad for Honduras—The National Hurricane Center predicts 5-8 inches of rain, with isolated amounts up to 12 inches--but this is far short of the 20+ inches of rain that fell during Hurricane Fifi and again in 1998 during Category 5 Hurricane Mitch. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico can also breather easier, as Felix's rains should not cause the kind of extreme flooding a larger storm would have caused. Also, it now appears that Felix will stay too far south to be influenced by the trough of low pressure forecast to move across the U.S. later this week, so at the moment, Texas appears safe from the storm.