The storm is gone from the tropics.<\/p>\n
Forecasters issued the last tropical warning on it days ago.<\/p>\n
What is left is a broad, deep low in the North Pacific.<\/p>\n
It is heading for the Bering Sea.<\/p>\n
Western Alaska’s coast is still raw from the last one.<\/p>\n
How a tropical system thousands of miles away becomes an Alaska problem is a question of physics, not coincidence.<\/p>\n
A typhoon runs on warm ocean water, pulling moisture upward and spinning it into a tight, violent core. Move that system north into colder water and the engine shuts down. But crossing under the North Pacific jet stream<\/strong> hands it a different one. Forecasters call the handoff extratropical transition, and it does not kill a storm so much as it reshapes its power source<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Instead of feeding on ocean heat, the system draws energy from the sharp contrast between cold Arctic air and the milder air trailing behind it. That clash, called baroclinic energy, can reinflate a weakening cyclone<\/strong> into something wider and slower to fade. It is the same path that has turned old Pacific typhoons into Bering Sea storms before.<\/p>\n So the wind did not simply die when the storm stopped being a typhoon. It changed shape<\/strong>, and it kept moving northeast.<\/p>\n The National Weather Service says the remnants will enter the Bering Sea on Wednesday and reach the west coast Thursday into Friday, with seas forecast to build as high as 29 feet<\/strong> south of 56 degrees north latitude. That is a wave as tall as a three story building.<\/p>\n Offshore, the numbers climbed through the week. Seas of 14 to 26 feet were forecast between 171 degrees west and the International Date Line north of 56 north under a Gale Warning. Seas south of 56 north are forecast at 15 to 29 feet Thursday and 21 to 28 feet Friday. The system merged with another low before entering the Bering Sea, and forecasters expect it to deepen to roughly<\/strong> 960 to 970 millibars.<\/p>\n Coastal communities braced for the wind that rides ahead of any big Bering Sea system. A High Wind Warning<\/strong> covering the Bering Strait Coast, Diomede and St. Lawrence Island carried south winds of 30 to 40 mph with gusts up to 60 mph<\/strong>. Local forecasters<\/a> described the week as a one two punch.<\/p>\n Even days out, forecasters could not pin down exactly where the worst flooding would land, because the track kept sliding between model runs. The biggest unknown was the exact path, and recent runs concentrated it near Nunivak Island, which would bring mostly offshore winds north of Hooper Bay and limit flooding along Norton Sound.<\/p>\n Nobody expected a clean miss. Storm surge would still keep water above normal, and forecasters said shoreline erosion<\/strong> remained likely. At Hooper Bay, a Coastal Flood Watch runs from Thursday morning through late Friday night, with water possibly reaching 4 to 6 feet<\/strong> above the normal high tide line. The watch warns that low lying areas may be inundated, including the airport access road.<\/p>\n Because the track kept shifting, officials chose their language carefully. The weather service said it was still too early for specific impact details, so watches could be expanded, upgraded or dropped. A system this size can still swing a hundred miles<\/strong> left or right.<\/p>\n To understand why this remnant carries so much punch, look back about a week. The storm passed near Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands at Category 5 strength<\/strong> in mid October, went through an eyewall replacement cycle, briefly weakened, then regained peak strength before crossing into the Philippine Sea.<\/p>\n At that peak it held maximum sustained winds<\/strong> of 185 mph, tying the highest one minute winds measured in any tropical storm on Earth<\/a> this year, a mark set by a super typhoon back in April. From there it passed Taiwan without making landfall, left tens of thousands<\/strong> of households without power, then weakened to a tropical storm and headed toward southern Japan before transitioning into an extratropical cyclone.<\/p>\n It was the thirteenth typhoon of an unusually active Pacific season. That single turn to the northeast set up everything now happening in the Bering Sea, the way a glacial basin above Juneau<\/a> emptied twice in a single year. The same cumulative math shows up in episodes like ocean overwash shutting a North Carolina highway<\/a>.<\/p>\n What makes this forecast worth watching is not the wind alone, but the timing. The current storm has been driving an atmospheric river<\/strong> into the state, and rain falling on already high water will likely keep levels elevated into the weekend, with winds in the 40 to 60 mph<\/strong> range and coastal erosion continuing. Layer a second big system on top of that, and a beach that barely held together the first time gets tested again.<\/p>\n Forecasters have been blunt about the pattern repeating. Active weather is expected to keep a train of storms<\/strong> moving through the Aleutians and Bering Sea over the next one to two weeks. For villages along the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta, this will not be the last test of the season.<\/p>\n The useful part is that the warnings arrived ahead of the water this time. Watches went up days in advance<\/strong>, which is the difference between a coastline that is surprised and one that is braced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The storm is gone from the tropics. Forecasters issued the last tropical warning on it days ago. What is left is a broad, deep low in the North Pacific. It is heading for the Bering Sea. Western Alaska’s coast is still raw from the last one. How a tropical system thousands of miles away becomes … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":44529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"typhoon s 185","rank_math_title":"A typhoon's 185 mph winds near Guam matched the year's strongest, and the storm's leftover energy is now pushing 29 foot seas toward western Alaska","rank_math_description":"A super typhoon that tied the year's strongest winds near Guam is gone, but its leftover energy is pushing seas as high as 29 feet toward western Alaska.","footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44525"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44530,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44525\/revisions\/44530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Twenty nine foot seas stack up in the Bering Sea<\/h2>\n
A storm track still bending around one island<\/h2>\n
A Category 5 that peaked only a week earlier<\/h2>\n
A coastline already worn thin by one storm season<\/h2>\n