Hurricane Polo

Hurricane — Category 4 Polo is packing 125-kt (145-mph) winds, moving NW at 6 kt (7 mph). Expected to stay over open water.

At 300 PM CST (2100 UTC), the center of Hurricane Polo was located near latitude 15.7 North, longitude 102.4 West. Polo is moving toward the northwest near 7 mph (11 km/h), and this motion is expected to continue through Thursday. A general west-northwestward motion is forecast on Friday and over the weekend. On the forecast track, the core of Polo is expected to be near the coast of southwestern Mexico through Thursday morning before it moves farther out to sea. Maximum sustained winds are near 145 mph (230 km/h) with higher gusts. Polo is a category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Slow strengthening is possible during the next day or so. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 40 miles (65 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 105 miles (165 km). The estimated minimum central pressure is 932 mb (27.53 inches).— National Hurricane Center · public advisory 13

This is the East Pacific · 14°N–28°N, 118°W–101°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.

Weather observers described a hurricane that had strengthened to major intensity while remaining offshore from southwestern Mexico, matching the official forecast of its power but underscoring how quickly it had built. They added that the system is now sending heavy rain toward the coast, raising the chance of life-threatening flooding and mudslides across several states and prompting evacuations in vulnerable areas.

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