Unnamed TS in Central Pacific?

[wxman57]

I was scanning the Pacific visible satellite imagery and came upon this feature near 23.1N, 177.6W. Looks like it's about 80-90 miles across north-south from the outer bands. "Eye" is about 6 miles across. I'm surprised CPHC isn't all over it. Perfect miss by scatterometers. Convection is a bit weak now. Lower image puts it in perspective.

[toad strangler]

WOW, TINY

[SoupBone]

I was scanning the Pacific visible satellite imagery and came upon this feature near 23.1N, 177.6W. Looks like it's about 80-90 miles across north-south from the outer bands. "Eye" is about 6 miles across. I'm surprised CPHC isn't all over it. Perfect miss by scatterometers. Convection is a bit weak now. Lower image puts it in perspective.

http://wxman57.com/images/TS1.JPG

http://wxman57.com/images/TS2.JPG

Don't you have more important things to worry about like that system about to impact Texas? I'M KIDDING!

That's a really cool thing. I can't even imagine how tiny it is. Any idea what the total diameter is, estimated?

[Kingarabian]

I was scanning the Pacific visible satellite imagery and came upon this feature near 23.1N, 177.6W. Looks like it's about 80-90 miles across north-south from the outer bands. "Eye" is about 6 miles across. I'm surprised CPHC isn't all over it. Perfect miss by scatterometers. Convection is a bit weak now. Lower image puts it in perspective.

[url]http://wxman57.com/images/TS1.JPG[url]

[url]http://wxman57.com/images/TS2.JPG[/ul]

Lol this particular feature would need to be a major hurricane before the CPHC even considers it.

[TheAustinMan]

An interesting swirl for sure, but I'd imagine it's a case of a faux closed circulation, i.e. the flow is such that the winds appear to be rotating around a "center" of the storm, when in fact a surface observer wouldn't measure a westerly wind. This is sometimes referred to as the "storm-relative" circulation being closed, but the "Earth-relative" circulation being open.

An analogy, albeit a convoluted one: imagine driving westbound in a black car on the middle lane of a 3-lane highway. A red car on your left overtakes you, passes in front of you, and then moves to the right lane and slows down enough for you to overtake them again. Perhaps they're headed for an exit. At the same time, a blue car is coming up from behind. They start speeding up, change lanes to the left and pass you ahead. From your perspective, in the black car, it seems as if the red and blue cars are orbiting around you, but from an outside (stationary) observer, everyone is still driving westbound, just at various speeds.

A very convoluted drawing in MS Paint.


Such circumstances are common when the background flow is very fast or when the faux circulation is located at the top of an inverted trough and there is a high contrast of winds north and south of that trough.

The latest ASCAT, shown below, does not show much evidence of a closed circulation, but we do see a rather sharp change from 5 kt winds south of this feature (on the left of the image) to 20 kt winds just north. This can often give the appearance of a closed circulation when one does not exist.

Even if this system is smaller than ASCAT can resolve, which doesn't really appear to be the case based on the image, it'd probably wouldn't be worth classifying as a TC. Now I know many have taken issue with perceived lax standards for TC classification with the NHC, but I highly doubt that at any point they would designate a stratocumulus swirl with only -30C cloud tops at best without a high-confidence closed circulation... and plenty of these sorts of eddies stalk populated coasts throughout the spring, summer, and fall.

Now if we really want to talk about undesignated TCs in the Pacific, I think Invest 90E and 99E have demonstrated that they could (and maybe should) have been designated as TCs earlier today, based on the available scatterometer and visible satellite data.

164 KB. Source: KNMI