Dorian wind speed and pressure

af4ex

[31-Aug@16:30 UTC] Many news outlets are reporting that Dorian is currently nearing "Cat 5" intensity. But, using the Windy weather picker (in "Winds" mode), the max surface winds appear to be about 71mph (on the North side) and pressure (in "Pressure" mode) at the eye is 1004mbar (30 minutes ago it was 980mbar).

In other words, Dorian seems to be barely Cat 1 intensity as currently rendered by Windy.

What is going on? Is the Windy weather picker broken? Or is the strength of this storm being over-hyped by the mass media?

idefix37

@af4ex

This question has been raised many times, almost for every hurricane:

https://community.windy.com/topic/4415/why-is-wind-speed-in-hurricanes-so-wrong

In this long list of articles, some explain perfectly why global models can not predict the intensity of hurricanes. The others you can forget them.
I would like to add that the ECMWF model, which is Windy's default model, uses the average wind speed over 10 minutes. The Saffir-Simpson scale is based on a sustained 1-minute wind which is about 15% higher.
Then, if you compare GFS, ECMWF, and NAM, the higher the model resolution, the closer the speed to NHC's. If they send recon flights to hurricanes, there is a reason. Otherwise, they would only use weather models.
For me, at least, the trajectory prediction by models is quite good and especially by ECMWF.

stanard

This is showing a 29 MPH wind near the center of hurricane Dorian. I installed this app to give me hurricane info. Right now, Dorian is a Cat 5 at 175 MPH winds.

This app is doing me no good with such ridiculous "data".

Gabou971

@stanard Well 29mph is not that ridiculous because the wind at the very center of it should be equal to zero :)

Just read the post above.
No models can depict the real conditions in that kind of storms except very specialized ones which are used by scientists, running only in the area of the storm. Can you imagine? The wind changes 360 degrees in an area of 10km, from 0 to 180 mph and with a huge pressure drop... That is insane. No super computer can modelize this. We still need planes to investigate storms like that to really know what's happening.

Moreover windy is not intended to predict wind in such phenomenom and I swear it's very accurate in your normal people life.

...

Pray for the Bahamas... I was in the eye of hurricane Irma and I know that cat 5 hurricanes are some kind of monsters which haunt you forever, especially if experienced on a small island that is flat and not big enough to reduce wind speed and stop the convection... And on top of that extremely vulnerable to waves and storm surge... It's definitely a life threatening hurricane and some people are going to die there because of it. It's terrible to know it and having nowhere to run like on the "mainland" where you can follow evacuation routes.

Stay safe!