2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season Animation - GOES East Imagery

[Brian Osburn]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeHR5MuqbRc[/youtube]

This is an animation derived from GOES East satellite imagery. It contains 10,197 individual image files; each one manually downloaded from the NOAA NESDIS server. This effort took seven months to complete, and has been upgraded from past animations to include stills and animated gifs of all named storms, their peak intensities, and coordinates at landfall.

The most interesting moment in this video is when it appears that Hurricane Joaquin turns a fire hose onto South Carolina. I have never seen anything like that before. South Carolina suffered massive, statewide flooding from that major hurricane. Besides lashing the Bahamas for a couple of days, Joaquin also sank the cargo ship "El Faro" and killed all thirty-two crewmembers on board.

At the end of this video, the actual number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes is compared to the pre-season predictions of the National Weather Service, Colorado State University, and The Weather Channel.

Here is a timeline of all named storms in the 2015 Hurricane Season Animation:

00:35 - Ana
03:50 - Bill
06:00 - Claudette
08:55 - Danny
09:25 - Erika
09:50 - Fred
10:20 - Grace
10:40 - Henri
11:25 - Ida
12:10 - Joaquin
12:30 - SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT - Joaquin's Fire Hose Effect upon South Carolina
15:30 - Kate

[NDG]

Very cool, it was a very painful time watching how dead late June to late July was, and if you blink for more than a second you miss TS Claudette, the only storm that formed in that period when shear & SAL dominated the deep tropics.
It was cool watching once again the transformation of the the ULL that eventually became MJ Joaquin, it took longer than I initially had thought.

[psyclone]

very cool...and as a second thought...so much for the curse of the year ending in "5" for the states.

[Brian Osburn]

I really appreciate the feedback from you folks. You can imagine that making something "very cool" like that takes a lot of time and effort.

Was Tropical Storm Bill my last cyclone chase? It well might be...as I am now living in Ecuador with a permanent visa.

I wrote to my fans today and told them if we get a long tracked storm (like Ivan) in the future...and they pony up the money for me to chase it, then I might suspend my retirement for a week or so to give them that one, big, EPIC chase that avoided me these past five years because of the lack of tropical cyclone activity.

Anyway...as long as I'm still sucking air...I will continue to make these hurricane season animations. I may be the only one on the planet doing the work, and I think the end result is important for a historical perspective on tropical conditions year in and year out.