Hurricane Jeanne

Pre-Landfall 3 | Summary
Posting Date: September 25, 2004, 10:00:00 AM

Three weeks after the Bahamas were battered by Hurricane Frances, Hurricane Jeanne is making its own assault on the country’s northwest islands. Jeanne made a direct hit on Abaco earlier this morning and, as of 11:00 a.m. EDT, is heading for Freeport on Grand Bahama. Hurricane Jeanne has strengthened since AIR’s last posting and is now a Category 3 storm on the Saffir Simpson scale with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph and higher gusts. Minimum central pressure is 959 mb. Jeanne is currently located about 75 miles east of Freeport and 155 miles east of the Florida coast. The storm is moving to the west at 14 mph and a turn to the west-northwest is expected during the next 12 hours. This motion should bring the center of Hurricane Jeanne over the Florida coast late tonight or early Sunday morning. According to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), some additional strengthening is likely and there is some chance that Jeanne may reach Category 4 status before landfall. Storm surge of 4 to 6 feet can be expected near and to the north of the landfall point. Rainfall amounts of 5 to 10 inches are forecast for already saturated soils. Hurricane Jeanne has also grown in size. Hurricane force winds now extend to 70 miles from the storm’s center. Tropical storm force winds extend to 205 miles. A hurricane warning is in effect along the Florida east coast from Florida City north to St. Augustine. Millions of residents in nine Florida counties are under mandatory evacuation orders. The AIR tropical cyclone team has run new scenarios using the latest information about Jeanne’s meteorological parameters and the storm’s forecast track. Five scenarios are now posted on the scenarios page of this website, where CATRADER® and CLASIC/2™ clients can view wind speed and loss maps. In addition, probability-weighted event sets representing the full range of simulated scenarios are available for download. Given the considerable uncertainty that still exists with respect to the future track and intensity of Hurricane Jeanne, we strongly recommend that you download the full event set and generate the statistics of interest to you. Please note that the losses provided in this posting are for the U.S. only. Final losses for the Caribbean will be posted tomorrow. The AIR tropical cyclone modeling team continues to monitor Hurricane Jeanne and will post new loss estimates after landfall tomorrow.

Pre-Landfall 3 | Downloads
Posting Date: September 25, 2004, 10:00:00 AM