Record Breaking 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season Ends

 

DISCLAIMER: This blog post presented by PlayaWeatherman

The 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season has thankfully come to an end. There was a record of 30 named storms. See the article by NOAA here.

Storm names for the Atlantic Ocean basin for 2020.  Crossed 
out names are storms that occurred.

Map of storms as of October 31, 2020.

This season was very busy in the Riviera Maya too. We had Cristobal in early June and then Gamma, Delta, and Zeta in October. Here are NOAA GOES-16 Infrared images for Gamma and Delta as they made landfall in the Riviera Maya on October 3 and 7, respectively. 

Tropical Storm Gamma at 7:30 a.m. on October 3, 2020.

Hurricane Delta at 6:00 a.m. on October 7, 2020. GOES-16 was taking visible images every minute as Gamma made landfall just south of Puerto Aventuras, as seen in the below movie.

Tropical Storm Gamma from 9:20-9:50 a.m. on October 3, 2020.

Looking at data from the weather station at the Puerto Aventuras Navy station is also very interesting. The atmospheric pressure graph from October 2-8, 2020 below clearly shows the passage of the center of these two storms.

The graphs of the wind speed show that in Puerto Aventuras the winds were actually stronger and were more prolonged for Tropical Storm Gamma than for Hurricane Delta. Gamma had winds of about 30 mph, with gusts to about 55 mph. Delta had winds of about 27 mph, with gusts to about 45-50 mph.

Hurricane Zeta made landfall at Ciudad Chemuyil (about 15 miles south of Puerto Aventuras) at 11:10 p.m. on October 26, 2020. See GOES-16 infrared image at 11:01 p.m. below.

Below is a chart that shows the atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind gust speed from the Puerto Aventuras Navy weather station from Oct 26-27, 2020. Winds (in green) reached over 30 mph, with gusts (in red) to 65 mph. These occurred as the pressure (in blue) dropped to about 990 millibars as the storm made landfall.

A resident of Puerto Aventuras posted a YouTube video of the damage. Below are damage photos from around Puerto Aventuras Resort on October 27, 2020 after the passage of Hurricane Zeta.