Hurricane Opal made landfall on the Florida peninsula 4 OCT 1996. Opal intensified from 85 to 130 kt (43 to 66 m/s) over an 18 hr period just before landfall. It is of interest to study the environmental and dynamical aspects that lead to such rapid storm development. As a first step to a larger study, the analyses prepared by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Hurricane Prediction System (Kurihara et al. 1998) are examined at the twelve hour intervals available. Of particular interest are the evolution of dynamically-focused parameters, such as potential vorticity (PV) and momentum convergences, preceding and during the period of intensification to a 130 kt storm. This presentation is meant primarily as a survey, or detailed look at the parameters of interest, and as a test of the applicability of the GFDL analysis to a dynamical examination of this kind.
Ref: Kurihara, Yoshio, Robert E. Tuleya, and Morris A. Bender, 1998: The GFDL Hurricane Prediction System and its performance in the 1995 hurricane season. Mon. Wea. Rev., 126, 1306-1322.