Waiting For The Terrible News After Hurricane Iota Strikes Nicaragua

Hurricane Iota as a Category 5 yesterday bearing 
down on Nicaragua

 Hurricane Iota slammed into Nicaragua last night with sustained winds of 155 mph, with surely devastating results.  

It had "weakened" from top wind Category 5 wind speeds of 160 mph while the storm was just offshore, but of course that 5 mph decline made absolutely no difference in the devastation. 

Hurricane Iota came ashore just 15 miles from where Category 4 Hurricane Eta hit two weeks ago. Which means the same area was devastated by Category 4 hurricanes in the same month.  The trauma for the people who live in that area must be just awful. 

We don't have details of what exactly is happening in that storm, as it's still raging. Hurricane Iota is smacking into the mountainous terrain in Nicaragua, which means its winds will die down very quickly and mercifully today.

But Iota has to rain itself out in these mountains, already super saturated by Eta.  As a result, the flash flooding and mud slides will be immense, with up to 30 inches of rain expected.

The only saving grace with Iota is it will die over the Nicaraguan mountains.  That's in contrast to Hurricane Eta, which bounced off the mountains back into the southern Gulf of Mexico. Eta then went on to cause extensive flooding days later in Cuba and Florida. 

Not happening this time. 

There's some weird stuff going on with this year's hurricane season. This is the busiest one on record, as we've already established, with 30 named storms.  Believe it or not, there's a chance of another tropical storm next week in the western Caribbean Sea. 

Hurricane Iota was the strongest hurricane of the 2020 season. That's especially strange since the strongest hurricane of any season (usually, but not always) hits near the peak of the season in late August or September. 

Like several hurricanes this season - such as Laura, Delta and Eta - Iota strengthened very rapidly from not much to a monster in a matter of a day or two.  In fact, looking at records that date back roughly a century,  three of the 11 hurricanes in the Atlantic that have strengthened the quickest have occurred in the past month. (That's Delta, Eta and Iota).

Iota was also obviously the strongest November hurricane to strike Nicaragua. The previous record was set by Hurricane Eta a couple weeks ago. 

Many factors contributed to this year's busy and tragic hurricane season.  One important factor was high sea surface temperatures. Those warm waters were made toastier in part due to climate change, so there's certainly evidence that climate change might have made this year's hurricane death and damage toll worse than it otherwise would have been.