Isabel's mutliple vorticities within the eye are attributed to Rossby Waves.
Capecodder found this information (which lies on another thread but I felt that this deserves it's on separate thread and I'm going to repost these findings here.
Originally posted By capecodder
Those star-like vortices are called Rossby waves. I had no idea, but was ofer at Lou's Weather, and under tropical links, on the main page, there's a pretty technical description of them. Apparently they're not unusual in Cat 5s.
I meant to include this pic.
http://community-2.webtv.net/ltursi/doc1/
Great find, Capecodder.
I did a search on Rossby waves and found a couple of things on those as well.
http://www.asp.ucar.edu/colloquium/1998/montgomery.html
This last paragraph from that link above is very striking in its statement.
In closing, we are now in a slightly more educated position to provide some preliminary answers to the motivating questions posed at the beginning of this lecture. Given the tendency for a developing TC to form a vortex sheet in its eyewall, asymmetries (‘eddies’) in TC’s are inevitable without asymmetric forcing from the TC environment. Moreover, eddies near the interior edge of the eyewall appear to be necessary in order for a hurricane to reach its maximum potential intensity. Although the necessity of eddies in TC’s is not surprising in light of the three-dimensional nature of cumulus convection on small scales and barotropic and inertial instability in the TC’s outflow layer (Anthes 1982, Black and Anthes 1971, Flatau and Stevens 1989), the implications of this realization for the vorticity dynamics of the eyewall region of the TC are just beginning to become appreciated.
Appears to me that Isabel reached its maximum potential hurricane intensity because of the features above. Also of note, it definitely appeared in its inception that there were mesovorticies embedded in the overall circulation of Isabel when it was developing which only seemed to aid in its development to make the storm one of the most powerful and talked about storm in quite some time.
Another link for the Rossby Waves phenomenon from GFDL. It's a postscript file and requires a postscript viewer (something I haven't installed on this new machine just yet).
http://www.gfdl.gov/~dsn/morew1preprint.ps
SF
