Looking Back at Hurricane Celia (credit: National Weather Service in Corpus Christi, Texas)

DISCUSSION: As we turn the clocks all the way back to forty years ago this week, we arrive at the fairly historic western Gulf landfall of Hurricane Celia.  Celia was an even more impressive tropical cyclone based on the fact that it was a storm which formed during the earlier part of the onset of the more advanced remote sensing era.  Thus, even with the advantage of regional forecasters having consistent access to earlier GOES satellite imagery, there were certainly still challenges with the wind and rainfall forecast based on the slow forward speed associated with the west-northwestward movement of Hurricane Celia just prior to and the time of landfall in far southeastern Texas.  Attached below is part of the full discussion from the original post courtesy of the National Weather Service based in Corpus Christi, Texas.

"Hurricane Celia blasted the Coastal Bend of Texas. On August 3rd, 1970, Hurricane Celia made landfall near Port Aransas as a major Hurricane (category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale) with sustained winds of 130 mph. Celia is the last major hurricane to make landfall on the middle Texas Coast. Celia's life cycle consisted of two rapid intensification periods, but most interesting was the explosive damaging wind gusts in the western semi-circle of the eye wall, in addition to the typical damaging eastern half of the center."

To learn more about this particular event, click on the following link.

To learn more about other past historic weather events from around the world, be sure to click here!

©2017 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz