You may have heard meteorologists talk about "eyewall replacement" when it comes to a hurricane's development, but what does that actually mean?

An eyewall replacement cycle is a process that occurs in hurricanes, where the inner eyewall is replaced by a newly formed outer eyewall. This process can lead to significant changes in the storm's characteristics, including fluctuations in intensity, changes in the size of the eye, and an expansion of the wind field. During Hurricane Aaron, these cycles resulted in the storm weakening from a category five to a lower category before re-intensifying after the cycle completed. The expansion of the wind field also meant that tropical storm conditions were felt much farther from the storm's center.

What is an eyewall replacement cycle?

When you compare to what happened yesterday or what Aaron looked like yesterday, it's a totally, totally different hurricane right now. Yeah yesterday I think the storm underwent or started to undergo another eyewall replacement cycle. An eyewall replacement cycle, let's talk about exactly what that is and what it has meant for Hurricane Aaron specifically. So in any hurricane you have the eye of the storm system and right on the outside is the eyewall. That's what we're gonna be talking about. Now in these eyewall replacement cycles, you have the inner eye wall. It ends up getting as strong as it can be in the current storm system. Then you see an outer eyewall develop. Eventually it takes over and becomes the dominant eyewall, hence eyewall replacement cycle. It can also be compared to a snake shedding its skin. That's probably an easier way to think about it. Now, what does this mean for the storm system? There's a couple things that happen as this process is taking place for Aaron. Specifically, we've seen fluctuations in intensity of the storm. We've seen the size of the actual eye of the hurricane change. We've also seen the wind field expand. Let's dive into those a little bit more. So first, the intensity changing. We've gone from a category five to a category three category four and then ultimately a category two for a lot of the day Tuesday. A lot of this was happening. The storm going down in categories as the eyewall replacement cycle was ongoing, then re intensifying after that cycle was complete. Then we talk about the actual eye changing a visual indication here. Saturday we had pretty small. I very kind of pinpoint like by Monday it was much larger because of that eye wall replacement cycle. But you can also notice the hurricane itself. The storm system is larger as well. That's that wind field expanding overall. That's also why we talk about tropical storm like conditions being present 200 miles out from the center of the storm.

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