Tropical Storm Fay's Land-Hugging Path Kept It Weak

Willie Drye
for National Geographic News

August 21, 2008

Tropical storm Fay is likely to be remembered as a strange, soggy, stubborn storm that drenched much of Florida during its leisurely ramble across the peninsula this week.

With its third landfall late this morning, Fay's rains have triggered heavy flooding that has blocked roads and forced evacuations, prompting Florida Governor Charlie Crist to declare a state of emergency for the entire state.

But the storm's trek near and over land is what kept it from becoming a very intense hurricane that could have inflicted extreme damage to the region, experts say.

All of the ingredients were in place to stoke a monster, including very warm waters in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico and minimal upper-level winds.

"This thing had real potential to be a big, big storm," said Keith Blackwell, a meteorologist at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile. Fay easily could have become a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, he added.

Instead Fay has meandered slowly over the Florida Peninsula, virtually stalling in some places while staying just below hurricane strength.

Island Hopping

As of this morning, the center of the storm sat offshore from Daytona Beach, allowing Fay to continue dumping heavy rains across northeastern Florida.

Governor Crist announced at a morning news conference that parts of Florida's east coast have experienced "historical rainfall," including more than 25 inches (63.5 centimeters) near the town of Melbourne.

When Fay formed on August 16, it skimmed near land before reaching the Florida Peninsula.

"It has tried to hit just about every piece of land on its way to Florida," Blackwell said.

"It's had a very difficult time trying to organize, particularly in the Caribbean, when it moved directly across Haiti and brushed a portion of eastern Cuba." (See a map of the region.)

From its origin in the northeast Caribbean, Fay moved slowly westward along the coast of Cuba, turned north, crossed the island, and took aim at the Florida Keys.

It picked up some intensity as it moved over the warm Florida Straits and crossed the Keys on Monday.

The storm then turned almost immediately toward the west coast of the Florida Peninsula and came ashore Tuesday at Cape Romano, just south of Naples.

From there, Fay moved slowly northeast across the state. But instead of weakening, as tropical storms almost always do over land, Fay intensified.

The reason, Blackwell said, was because Fay sidled up to an upper-level wind current that kept the storm's structure intact and allowed it to strengthen while over land.

Fay got another shot of energy when it drifted offshore and stalled over the Gulf Stream, a current of warm water that flows northward along the southeastern U.S. coast, said meteorologist Dennis Feltgen at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The storm made its third landfall late Thursday as it drifted back westward across Florida. Only three other tropical storms have made three landfalls in Florida since 1851, Feltgen said.

Staying Near Land?

Fay will likely drift slowly westward during the next two days and will eventually dissipate somewhere along the Gulf Coast, Feltgen said.

The University of South Alabama's Blackwell said Fay probably will remain over land as it moves westward, and that's lucky for the Gulf Coast. Were the storm to veer out over the Gulf of Mexico, it could quickly gain strength.

"The atmospheric environment is extremely favorable for the intensification of this storm over the northeast Gulf of Mexico if it gets away from the coastline," Blackwell said.

But the chances of the storm drifting out into the Gulf, he said, are "increasingly doubtful."