Hurricane John has developed something called a “pinhole eye,” which Chris Mooney declares “spooky“. I don’t know from pinhole cameras, but apparently this is a big deal, according to Chris:

The same thing happened when Hurricane Wilma put on a record burst of intensification last year, building up from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane in just 24 hours.

The forecasters were more than a little surprised by Wilma’s intensification, and they seem surprised by John as well. At 8 am PDT this morning, they called the storm a Category 1 hurricane with 70 knot (or 80 mph) winds. In 12 hours, they predicted, it would be an 85 knot (or nearly 100 mph) Category 2 storm.

Well, instead, it’s now a 100 knot or 115 mph Category 3 storm, and they’re predicting 115 knots or 133 mph winds (weak Category 4) within 12 hours.

The latest model runs show John running up the coast of Mexico, with no agreement on weather it slams Baja or turns out to sea. The National Hurricane Center forecasters are going with the “turn out to sea” angle.

Chris alludes to the Great San Diego Hurricane of 1858. Michael Chenoweth and Chris Landsea wrote a fascinating paper a couple of years back in BAMS piecing together the storm’s story from old newspaper clippings and the like.

A helpful colleague points out hurricane John, which is strengthening as it runs up Mexico’s west coast. Happily for the folks living in Baja, most of the models show John living out its life over water. Of course it would be wrong of me to hope that John follows the GFDL model track up into Mexico and Arizona. Of course it would be wrong of me to hope for this newspaper headline: “John Devastates Tucson,” or “John Brings Flooding to New Mexico.”

Courtesy Avelino Maestas:

Here’s the thing to notice: a bright sunny day, a creek that apparently is normally dry (else the plants alongside would be different), yet look at the muddy chocolate milk thing going on.

Years ago, I was hanging out on a hillside in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon with a group of geologists (I know – rough job, but somebody’s got to do it) when a late summer thunderstorm blew through. It was a gully just like this – completely dry, turned into a mini-torrent. Our problem was that the gully bottom was essentially the only trail back to camp. I still have a pair of formerly white socks stained reddish brown from wading through the water that day.

Jim Giles has a story in last week’s Nature (sub. req.) pointing to some preliminary work linking warm Atlantic temperatures to last year’s devastating Amazon drought:

The drought first caught scientists’ interest because its cause was unusual. Dry spells in the Amazon usually occur in El Niño years, when warm water off the Pacific coast of South America sets up a pattern of circulating air that inhibits rainfall in the Amazon. But last year was not an El Niño year.

Instead, the drought was caused by a circulation pattern powered by warm seas in the Atlantic — the same phenomenon responsible for last year’s unusually intense Atlantic hurricane season. The result was a dry spell that hit particularly hard in the western Amazon, a region that normally has more rainfall than other parts of the forest.

Giles points to some interesting modeling work by Peter Cox that had predicted more frequent droughts in the future because of warmer Atlantic waters. At the time Cox published the work, people didn’t take it seriously, according to Giles, because the warm Atlantic-drought thing hadn’t been seen before. Cox is apparently being taken a bit more seriously.

The latest drought monitor, out this morning, pretty much wipes out drought conditions completely across much of New Mexico:

In New Mexico, D1 and D0 conditions were reduced over much of the state. A large area free of drought designation exists in central New Mexico and a new drought-free area was introduced in northeast New Mexico. After a dry start to the year, many locations in New Mexico are at or above normal for the year, and flooding concerns across the state have superseded drought concerns. In Arizona, the wet pattern has allowed for many hydrological issues to improve and is shown in the current drought status.

We’ve still got reservoir shortfalls, so I wouldnt’ really say the drought’s over. But we’re in much, much better shape than we were two months ago when all of this started.

Summer rains usually don’t do much good at Elephant Butte, New Mexico’s major storage reservoir. (I touched on this a bit last week in my on line Journal chat.) But this summer’s been extraordinary. So how’s the Butte doing?

One of my water geek contacts sent me this link, to daily numbers from the Bureau of Reclamation. The Butte was at 183,000 acre feet on July 28, the low point of the year. It’s up to 295,000 acre feet as of this writing. So how big a deal is that?

On average, Elephant Butte drops 30,000 acre feet in August. So we’re clearly moving in the right direction. But Average end-of-August storage is 1.2 million acre feet. So we’ve still clearly got a long way to go. Summer rains, even the wettest since we’ve had rain gauges in New Mexico, are not enough to erase drought caused by lack of winter precip.

So I’m now fully prepared to look stupid.

This morning’s front page of the newspaper included a short story by me about the rains finally shutting down.

Umm. Hold that thought. Hurricane Ileana is changing the picture in a hurry, with the possibility of a big slug of moisture come the weekend:

AT LEAST SOME PORTION OF MOISTURE FROM TROPICAL STORM WELL S OF BAJA CA MAY GET ENTRAINED INTO THE FLOW. THAT WOULD BE AN EVEN BIGGER NIGHTMARE FOR THE ALREADY WATERLOGGED PORTIONS OF THE STATE