Hurricane Delta to hit Louisiana coast 1 month after Laura

UPDATES Friday October 9, 2020:

11:00 PM: Up to 17.02" of rain has fallen in the Lake Charles area:

9:00 PM: Impressive wind gusts continue... for additional updates, read our Delta Live Blog or Hurricane Delta Recap Story.

• Texas Point, Texas: 101 mph

• Lake Arthur, LA: 96 mph

• Lake Charles, LA: 95 mph

• Port Arthur, TX: 90 mph

• Jennings, LA: 89 mph

• Calcasieu Pass, LA: 89 mph

• Acadiana, LA: 86 mph

600 PM CDT Fri Oct 09 2020
…DELTA MAKES LANDFALL NEAR CREOLE LOUISIANA…

6:45 PM: Lake Charles airport has now gusted to 75 mph. Storm surge from Hurricane Delta at Freshwater Canal Locks has risen to 9 feet, obliterating their previous record of 8.02 feet during Hurricane Ike.

4:45 PM: Storm surge is now over 7 feet at Freshwater Canal Locks, and 6.1 feet at Calcasieu Pass, LA, as the eyewall makes landfall.

Here is what is likely the final update on offshore wind gusts:

4:00 PM: That gauge is now over 6.6 feet of storm surge. It has only been over 4.44 feet once in recorded history -- during Hurricane Ike in 2008. I've updated the wind list below.

2:30 PM: We now have a report of over 5 feet of storm surge at Freshwater Canal Locks on the coast of Louisiana:

High winds have started to spread inland. Here's a list:

• Gunnison Spar Oil Rig: 101 mph*

• Buoy #42002: 98 mph

• South Marsh Oil Rig: 78 mph*

• Boomvang Spar Oil Rig: 69 mph*

• Buoy #42035: 72 mph

• Beaumont, TX: 64 mph

• Sabine Pass, Texas: 70 mph

• Galveston Bay, TX: 60 mph

• Buoy #42019: 60 mph

• Brazos Oil Rig: 60 mph*

• Lake Charles, LA: 60 mph

• Calcasieu Pass, LA: 59 mph

*Station has an anemometer above standard height of 10 meters.

1:00 PM: Get the latest live coverage of Hurricane Delta on our Live Blog. The dreaded "radar hole" has arrived, due to Hurricane Laura's destruction of the NEXRAD radar in Lake Charles.

In addition to the hole shown over the water, a "partial hole" is present inland through Lake Charles through Lafayette, where the radar beam shoots too high to see what's going on at the surface. This can affect tornado detection and rainfall estimates. This image illustrates that by reducing the effective range of the radar data:

The Mobile Doppler Weather Radar from Oklahoma University in the area will help forecasters, but it is not integrated into their normal radar tools. You can read more about the radar hole in our story.

12:00 PM: Get the latest live coverage of Hurricane Delta on our Live Blog. Storm surge is already nearly 3 feet at San Luis Pass in Galveston, and it is so far from Hurricane #Delta that it *just* started raining there!

8:00 AM: Get the latest live coverage of Hurricane Delta on our Live Blog. The Gunnison Spar Oil Rig in the Gulf reported a wind gust to 101 mph in the eyewall of Hurricane Delta before the station stopped reporting this morning. The anemometer is at 200 feet, however, which is 170 feet higher than standard.

More impressive was Buoy #42002 which (last night) saw waves nearly 35 feet and winds gusting to 98 mph:

And check out that pressure drop! Hurricane Delta went right over this buoy, something that is very rare. The NHC said in the 1 AM statement:

"The minimum central pressure based on data by from the NOAA and Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft is 953 mb (28.14 inches). NOAA buoy 42002 very near the center of Delta also recently reported a minimum pressure of 953 mb (28.14 inches)."

While I don't want to minimize the impact of Hurricane Delta, it will have much less of a storm surge and much lower winds (especially inland) than Laura did, in a smaller area because it's a weaker, less organized storm. Here's a comparison between Laura's storm surge and winds versus Delta's forecast:

Thursday October 8, 2020: Hurricane Delta is bound for the coast of Louisiana, bringing high winds and storm surge back to communities devastated by Hurricane Laura just 40 days ago.

Delta, the first Greek-letter-named hurricane to make landfall in the United States and the 10th storm to make landfall in the U.S. this season (a new record), is forecast to land just east of where Laura did.

While a weaker Delta hitting just west of town may spare Lake Charles from the worst winds, it won't take much to disturb scores of debris piles from Laura and peel off the blue tarps that cover roofs as far as the eye can see.

It's hard to remember two hurricanes hitting the same place close enough in time to worry about roof tarps -- at least in the 25 years that I've been blogging. A couple that come to mind are Frances and Jeanne in 2004, that both hit near Port St. Lucie, Florida, just 19 days apart and Bertha and Fran, which hit Bald Head Island, North Carolina, just 49 days apart in 1996.

In 2017 of course, Hurricane Irma and Maria affected the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico just 14 days apart, but their paths didn't cross over land.

This is what Hurricane Delta looks like this afternoon. The storm has always looked disorganized, even when it reached Category 4 strength in the Caribbean.

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