Hurricane Henriette Recap, And Looking Forward to Dread Permanent Hurricane Felix

Life in the Arizona desert is so danged frustrating! Last night, I tried to offer solace to Friend Deborah:

Many consolations on Henriette almost making it to Phoenix, but not quite.....

Deborah chooses to look on the bright side:

There is cloud cover--that helps. : (

The irony, of course, is that even in many places Henriette has reached, it's not raining either, because it's so humid and cloudy that convection is being suppressed.

Currently, what remains of the center of the storm is out near Carrizozo, NM, heading NE.

One remarkable thing about Henriette is how it stalled directly over the Mexican coastal city of Guaymas, Sonora. The storm resisted getting pulled away from its life sustenance, the warm waters of the Sea of Cortez. For hours, the storm clung to the shores of Guaymas Bay, and clung to the shores, and when the upper level winds finally yanked it free, it surrendered to fate all at once. Heroic! But disastrous, of course, to the many people directly below, who probably wonder today what they did to deserve such a punishment. Today, the western slopes of the Sonoran Sierra Madre are a sopping mess.

There is a thunderstorm out near Prescott, AZ, right now that has started up. The extra water vapor left behind is a lot of ammunition for adventurous new thunderstorms, should they wish to fire up.

The next chance is Hurricane Felix. Rare among storms, it is likely to redevelop into a new, improved hurricane, after having survived this week's Central American passage. Current forecasts place it a little too far south to affect Arizona, but you never know. Instead, Felix might head west, and, in several weeks, harass Japan, or the Philippines, or Vietnam.

I think it would be a grand thing to have a Permanent Hurricane always trolling the vast, empty expanses of Earth's tropical oceans, taking leave every week or so to meet a colorful land mass, terrorize the inhabitants, and blast their possessions into smithereens. Felix is the best approximation we're likely to see in a long time to this dread Permanent Hurricane.

But maybe it would be a nobler thing to find a way to bring Felix into western Arizona instead, without Hurricane Nora's exhausted entry from a few years back, or Henriette's disappointing feint this year.