Odile slams Cabo, Arizona flash floods next?

Weather trouble in paradise

Hurricane Odile (Pronounced oh-DEAL) tore up Cabo San Lucas on Monday, and is crawling toward the southwest U.S. today.

http://youtu.be/dLY_eSrKyqM

Odile was the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall near Cabo San Lucas on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. The storm was still rated Category 3 with 125 mph winds as it made landfall. Winds gusted to at least 116 mph at the local weather service anemometer.

Weather Underground hurricane expert  Jeff Masters elaborates on the rare intensity of Odile:

Destructive Hurricane Odile powered ashore at Cabo San Lucas on Mexico's Baja Peninsula near 12:45 am EDT Monday as a Category 3 storm with 125 mph winds. Odile was the strongest hurricane on record to hit the Baja Peninsula, tied with Hurricane Olivia of 1967. 

An Air Force hurricane hunter plane was in Odile Sunday afternoon, and measured a surface pressure of 922 mb. This pressure puts Odile in pretty select company--only two other Eastern Pacific hurricanes have had lower pressures measured in them by the Hurricane Hunters (though a total of eleven Eastern Pacific hurricanes have had lower pressures, if we include satellite-estimated pressures.)

The only major hurricane on record to affect Southern Baja was Hurricane Kiko of 1989, which moved ashore on the Gulf of California side of the peninsula just south of La Paz as a Category 3 storm with 120 mph winds.

Odile's track was the worst case scenario for Cabo. The hurricane center passed right over the western tip of the Baja Peninsula, putting the ferocious eastern side of the eyewall right on the popular resort areas around Cabo San Lucas.

Up Next: Devastating flash flood potential for Arizona?

Odile is creeping up the Gulf of California toward the southwest U.S. today. Odile's unusual track, crawling up the Gulf of California toward Arizona may create an unprecedented situation for the Desert Southwest.

The narrow waters of the Gulf are extremely warm this time of year, near 90 degrees at the northern end of the Gulf near Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) in Mexico.

If Odile tracks over these warm open waters as many models favor she may retain a good deal of strength as she enters Arizona Wednesday, possibly even retaining tropical storm status far into the northern Gulf of California.

I spent 9 years working in Tucson and I can tell you from experience that this scenario is one local meteorologists in Arizona dread. A slow moving, intense tropical cyclone threading the needle up the incredibly warm waters of the Gulf of California.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's latest generated rainfall totals for Tucson and southern Arizona this week are jaw dropping. If rainfall totals approach the 5 to 9 inches as the latest seven-day NOAA output this morning suggests, there will be devastating -- even life threatening --flash floods in southern Arizona this week.

The largely bare desert soils simply can't absorb that kind of rainfall, and the steep mountainous local topography will serve to channel swift running flash floodwaters into usually dry river beds called "washes" that will run like raging rivers. The sheer force of that much water moving that fast may take out bridges in southern Arizona this week.

I have spent many days at the Tucson National Weather Serivce offices on the University of Arizona campus. Here's the early outlook on Odile from some folks I have worked closely with at Tucson NWS.

Stay tuned as Odile heads for southern Arizona and the Desert Southwest this week. This may become a major national news story.