Hurricane Patricia

Slate has an article by Eric Holthaus about a disaster that wasn't:

Hurricane Patricia made landfall near Cuixmala, Mexico, about fifty miles west of Manzanillo, with estimated maximum winds of 165 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. This makes Patricia the strongest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall on Mexico's west coast.
The National Hurricane Center, with official forecasting responsibility for the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, all but ran out of words to describe the storm’s ferocity, labeling it “potentially catastrophic” and “incredible”. On Twitter, professional weather watchers went a step further, marveling at the storm’s record-breaking ability and fearing for Mexico’s coastal cities. Such a scenario— a quickly strengthening storm of unprecedented strength headed straight for land— is the stuff of meteorologists’ nightmares.
As it moves inland, Patricia is expected to produce up to two feet of rain in Mexico’s coastal mountain range, creating a risk of flooding and mudslides over a vast area including Guadalajara, the country’s second-largest city.
As of Friday morning, Mexico was scrambling to prepare for Patricia. Three states— Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit— have declared states of emergency. In Colima, officials handed out sandbags. Nearly four hundred thousand people are in the storm’s path.
Patricia has now surpassed 1997’s Hurricane Linda, which stayed safely off Mexico’s west coast, as the strongest known storm in the eastern Pacific, and 2005’s Hurricane Wilma, as the strongest known storm in the Western Hemisphere. It may have also surpassed 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines, as the strongest known storm in world history. It’s difficult to compare tropical cyclones in the western Pacific, called typhoons, and eastern Pacific hurricanes, if only because routine aircraft measurements don’t exist in the western Pacific. Unlike Patricia, Haiyan was never directly measured by an aircraft, so we don’t know its true intensity.
Over the past thirty hours, Patricia’s central pressure has fallen by 114 millibars, from 994 to 880, possibly beating the world’s record for fastest intensification. Since lower air pressure drives faster wind speeds, such a fast intensification has greatly increased the storm’s strength; Patricia strengthened by a hundred mph in a day, the most in the era of complete data coverage by weather satellites. This historic data was collected by a hurricane hunter aircraft flying through the center of Patricia, which departed the storm as it was still strengthening. Shortly after the research plane left, satellite estimates of Patricia’s intensity broke the Dvorak scale, peaking at 8.3 on the 8.0 scale. In fact, Patricia is now very close to the theoretical maximum strength for a tropical cyclone on Earth.
If there is any good news, it’s that Patricia’s incredibly strong winds are concentrated into a narrow region near its core. The latest National Hurricane Center advisory shows Patricia’s peak winds are confined to a span of just fifteen miles across the center, which should help limit its impact at the time of landfall. Still, that’s little consolation for those in the storm’s direct path.
Patricia’s rapid intensification is linked to the current strong El Niño in the Pacific Ocean, which, along with global warming, has helped produce record-warm ocean temperatures in the region near where it formed.

Time has an article by Justin Worland about Mexico getting lucky with Patricia:

Hurricane Patricia— the strongest hurricane ever recorded— made landfall on Friday without causing the catastrophic damage that many had anticipated. That lack of destruction is in large part due to the storm’s record winds staying confined to a small area and hitting a relatively unpopulated region.
“The amount of damage is going to be entirely dependent on where the storm hits,” said Sean Sublette, a meteorologist at Climate Central. “If it had been a more heavily populated area, we’d be having a much different conversation.”
The storm made landfall near Cuixmala, a luxury retreat in a sparsely populated ocean reserve, early Friday evening with winds of around 165 miles per hour. But the storm’s strongest winds didn’t extend much beyond fifteen miles of its eye. The nearest city, Manzanillo, which has a population of more than a hundred thousand, is located more than fifty miles away.
Hurricane devastation is often due more to a combination of unfortunate circumstances rather than the sheer size of the storm. New Orleans, for instance, only sustained category 1 or 2 level winds during Hurricane Katrina, but the storm caused a high “storm surge”, when elevated waters get pushed onto land by the wind, which ultimately led to much of the devastating flooding. Failed levees and neighborhoods located below sea level only contributed to the problem. Damage due to Hurricane Sandy was also largely the result of a high storm surge.
While Hurricane Patricia avoided the most populated places along the coast, experts said that the storm had caused widespread damage in the area it did hit, including mud slides, flooding and power outages. Officials in the more densely populated areas, like tourist haven Puerto Vallarta, also appeared to follow preparation practices that would diminish the chances of injuries or death.
While the damage caused by Patricia may not scratch the record books, its strength certainly will. The storm’s winds reached two hundred miles per hour Friday before making landfall. “There was still damage and still flooding,” said Sublette. “It was a quite a kick.”

Rico says they were expecting to lose a big chunk of Mexico with this, but got lucky...