Aleria's Adventures

Super warm water blobs off Mexico's coast A few days ago, I wrote a story for the OCC website based on a scientific study that concluded that with warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic storms. Little did I know that just five days later, Hurricane Otis would destroy Acapulco.  The study published last week examined 830 Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1971. It found that in the last 20 years, 8.1% of the time storms powered from a Category 1 minor storm to a major hurricane in just 24 hours. That happened only 3.2% of the time from 1971 to 1990, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. When storms rapidly intensify, it makes it difficult for people in the storm’s path to decide what they should do — get out of the way or hunker down.  Hurricane Otis grew from a tropical storm yesterday morning in the eastern Pacific to a Categor...

Busy day today. Drove down to Kilrush at the crack of day, offloaded the rest of our stuff and the damned yankee sail. Lots of rainbows and interesting clouds on the way home. Some massive brief showers as well. But the wind and rain held off long enough for us to get all our stuff done. Yippee!

Slieve Donard coming down to the Irish Sea Victorian Hotel amidst dunes The ICC Committee hold their meetings in different regions of the country once a year. This year it was held in Northern Ireland. County Down is just across the border from the Republic. We hardly even noticed except that there were immediately signs for fireworks which you cannot buy in the south. We were heading for Newcastle in the Mourne Mountains on the sea.  The resort we stayed in wasn't anything extraordinary but the town of Newcastle was surprisingly beautiful. A waterfront promenade along the expansive beach. At one end lay Slieve Donard and at the other end dunes that stretch to the horizon. In between, the Irish Sea with beautiful sunshine glistening in the ripples.  The town itself was quite lovely and the people were very friendly. We had lunch in town and then drove out to visit the Annesley Garden tree trail at Castlewellen. The Castle itself is owned by some religious order and used as a r...