A weakened Hurricane Dean made a second landfall in Mexico around 11:30 a.m. eastern time near the small beach town of Tecolutla, just east of the city of Poza Rica in the state of Veracruz (Veracruz state map).
Dean had lost much of the immense power it had when it struck the Yucatán Peninsula early Tuesday morning, but still had winds of about 100 miles (160 kilometers) an hour, making it a Category 2 storm.
(See pictures: Hurricane Dean lashes Mexico's resort strip.)
By Wednesday afternoon Dean was crossing Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains, and forecasters expected the storm to deteriorate.
"It will weaken very rapidly," said Richard Pasch, a senior hurricane specialist at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.
"Those mountains are very high. I doubt it will last more than 12 to 24 hours. We may stop issuing advisories late tonight."
Pasch warned that the storm could drop as much as 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rain in some places.
But Dean was moving at more than 17 miles (27 kilometers) an hour, a relatively fast rate for a tropical system, and this speed could reduce its rainfall, he added.
Yucatán Destruction
Dean had made its spectacular landfall on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula early Tuesday morning as a very powerful Category 5 hurricane. At that time the storm's strongest sustained winds were 165 miles (266 kilometers) an hour.
Michelle Mainelli, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, said the storm's trek across the Yucatán Peninsula weakened it considerably.
"There's higher terrain across that area, and it's a large area of land," Mainelli said. "That disrupted the core of the hurricane significantly."
The storm had cleared the west coast of the Yucatán by 5 a.m. this morning.
Although Dean started to reorganize once it entered the Bay of Campeche—the southernmost reaches of the Gulf of Mexico—Dean was not over water long enough to regain enough power to be considered a major hurricane before its second landfall.
"It's going to run out of time," Mainelli said Wednesday morning.
After the Deluge
Meteorologists will be analyzing data from Hurricane Dean for months, but Mainelli said the data isn't likely to reveal any surprises.
Meteorologists sometimes revise their estimates of maximum wind speed days or even years after some hurricanes make landfall.
But a U.S. Air Force hurricane-hunter aircraft was flying inside Hurricane Dean as it came ashore on the Yucatán Peninsula, and the plane's instruments obtained what probably will be final data on the storm's landfall.
"I don't think there will be huge changes after the fact," Mainelli said.
Though Dean is the third most powerful recorded Atlantic storm at landfall, the hurricane is the ninth most powerful overall. The most powerful was Hurricane Wilma, which achieved that rank in October 2005 as it crossed the Caribbean Sea en route to the Yucatán Peninsula.
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