Hurricane Lala delivered a stinging blow to Hawaiʻi over the weekend, pummeling the island chain with repeated rounds of prolific rain topping 3 feet (36 inches) across the wetter windward (east-facing) mountains of the Big Island. Winds gusted to 70 to 90 mph on the Big Island and topped 74 mph and 85 mph respectively on Maui and Oahu as the center of Lala slid about 60 to 75 miles to their south on Saturday local time.
Although the center of Lala never technically crossed land, it came to within about 25 to 30 miles of the Big Island as a Category 1 hurricane, the closest approach of any hurricane on record (since at least 1949) to the Big Island.
At Lala’s closest approach on Saturday, snow was even reported atop the nearly 14,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea, with winds at the time gusting to 119 mph and a wind chill of 24°F.
One of the wettest U.S. tropical cyclones on record
The upslope winds (winds blowing from the east and pushing up windward or east-facing mountain slopes) enhanced rainfall as Lala’s eyewall and outer bands collided with Hawai’i’s dramatic, undulating terrain on Saturday. Rainfall totals reached an incredible 43.55 inches at Laupāhoehoe Natural Area Reserve on the northeast side of the Big Island based on preliminary totals.
Lala will likely go down as one of the top 10 wettest tropical cyclones on record for the U.S. and perhaps the third wettest to affect Hawai’i, only behind Lane in 2018 and Hiki in 1950 which brought rainfall totals of 58 inches and 52 inches, respectively.
Even outside the Big Island, Lala dropped double-digit rainfall totals along windward slopes. Rainfall exceeded two feet (24 inches) along the Waikamoi Ridge on Maui and a foot (12 inches) in the Moanalua Valley northwest of Honolulu on Oahu.
Though rainfall totals stayed in the single digits on the drier, downslope side of the islands, including in some of the state’s more densely populated districts, hurricane force wind gusts knocked out power to over a quarter million customers at the storm’s peak, including nearly 175,000 customers on Oahu, constituting more than half of all Hawaiian Electric customers on the state’s most populous island.
As of Monday morning, about 116,000 customers remain without power, according to PowerOutage.us, or about 25% of customers across the state.
Another central Pacific system possible this week but should stay south of Hawai’i
Lala continues to pull away from Hawai’i today and though another system may develop southeast of Hawai’i later this week, forecast models largely keep it weaker and tracking well south of the state through the upcoming weekend.
Atlantic systems fizzle
Meanwhile on the Atlantic side, the two systems we were tracking last week – Invest 92L and Invest 94L – have fizzled.
Invest 92L was torn apart by a firehose of wind shear as it moved quickly through the Caribbean this weekend and Invest 94L is succumbing to the same fate, being shredded to pieces just east of the Caribbean islands early Monday.
We’ll continue to watch the waves roll off Africa this month, but for now, models suggest they’ll have a hard journey given El Niño’s stronghold on the basin.
So far we’ve not yet recorded an Atlantic hurricane. The average date of the first hurricane in the Atlantic is August 11th. The latest date for the first hurricane formation is September 11th (a record held by Hurricanes Gustav in 2002 and Humberto in 2013). No Atlantic hurricane season in the modern era has ended without a hurricane.
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