Hammy wrote:supercane4867 wrote:Regarding Earl 98 - it probably indeed wasn't a CAT2. The best track intensity was based off of a mere 104kt FL wind reading at 850mb. Had SFMR been made widely available back then it's pretty unlikely that it would record >80kt surface winds due to the system's poor structure unable to translate those FL winds to the surface. In fact recon never reported an eyewall in Earl and its asymmetric wind field resembles more of a squall line than a hurricane.
Earl was moving pretty fast so there was more than likely enough forward speed added to justify Cat 2 intensity.
Bertha in 1996 (east of Florida) is a top contender for me, because for about 12-18 hours you had a completely exposed center, and essentially half a hurricane. In fact, the entire low level eyewall cloud was exposed one afternoon.
https://i.imgur.com/d55oxhY.png
Probably not tbh. While the 104 kt wind at 850mb would usually support ~80 kt, sondes in the storm's rmw are quite underwhelming.
http://tropicalatlantic.com/recon/recon ... -995-76-39http://tropicalatlantic.com/recon/recon ... 27-999-76-http://tropicalatlantic.com/recon/recon ... -997-77-42http://tropicalatlantic.com/recon/recon ... 1001-72-40If taken at face value, these could suggest a conversion factor of .51 or thereabouts, which would support ~55 kt, aligning with KCZ for the reconnaissance observed 985 mb. This would also make sense given sfc obs in the landfall zone supporting 55 kt directly, but given the detrimental affects of land friction etc you could make a case for 60-65. NHC didn't have reliable SFMR data at the time so they of course did the best they could, but in general Earl reminds me of Isaias 2020. Very high winds at flight level with poor mixing.