Hurricane Polo

Hurricane — Category 5 Polo is packing 155-kt (180-mph) winds, moving N at 0 kt (0 mph). Expected to stay over open water.

At 300 PM CST (2100 UTC), the eye of Hurricane Polo was located by a NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft near latitude 14.6 North, longitude 101.5 West. Polo is nearly stationary, but a slow northwestward motion is expected tonight followed by a generally west-northwestward motion over the next couple of days. On the forecast track, the core of Polo is expected to be near the coast of southwestern Mexico through the middle of this week, although it is forecast to remain offshore. Maximum sustained winds are near 180 mph (285 km/h) with higher gusts. Polo is a category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Some additional strengthening is possible tonight, with fluctuations in strength possible Wednesday and Wednesday night. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 35 miles (55 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 90 miles (150 km). The mi— National Hurricane Center · public advisory 9

This is the East Pacific · 13°N–26°N, 117°W–100°W. Polo’s forecast track is the dotted spine — the labelled dots mark its position each day. Every cell is shaded by how many hours it spends inside Polo’s gale-force (≥34 kt · 39 mph) wind across the whole forecast, the damaging core counted double.

Read it two ways at once. Colour is the total — the hours of gale-force wind a place piles up. A slow storm writes its danger in duration, not in any single gust, so the longer the wind sits over a place, the deeper its colour. Opacity is confidence — solid where the official probability of that wind is high, faint where it is only a chance. So a deep, solid cell is a place the wind will work for a long time and likely will; a pale, faint one is a brief, uncertain brush at the edge of the cone.

The storm off southwest Mexico followed its forecast timeline exactly, surging from a modest 40-mile-per-hour system into a 130-mile-per-hour hurricane with little warning beyond what was already expected. One explainer stressed the rapid jump to major intensity south of the coast and the direct threat this posed to land. Those observations match the official outlook on both the speed and the path of the strengthening.

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