Tracking Fred And Grace – August 16, 2021

National Weather Forecast

Fred has become a tropical storm once again in the Gulf of Mexico, and it is expected to strengthen some before landfall along the northern Gulf Coast Monday afternoon or evening.

Tropical Storm Warnings are in place along the northern Gulf Coast along with Storm Surge Warnings ahead of Fred.

We are also tracking Tropical Depression Grace which has been bringing heavy rain to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It will continue to track across the Greater Antilles over the next few days, bringing heavy rain and gusty winds along with it. That includes in Haiti which was struck by at M7.2 earthquake Saturday.

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Death toll from 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Haiti rises to over 700 people

More from CNN: “The Haitian government declared a state of emergency after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the country Saturday, leaving at least 724 people dead and injuring another 2,800, according to Haiti’s civil protection agency. The majority of deaths occurred in the south of the country, where 500 people are known to have died. The quake destroyed 2,868 homes and damaged another 5,410, officials from the agency said. The destruction has also pushed hospitals to the brink and blocked roads that would carry vital supplies.”

Scientists Traced a Wooly Mammoth’s Lifetime Journey, and It’s Astonishing

More from VICE: “Some 17,000 years ago, a male woolly mammoth traversed tens of thousands of miles across Alaska before it died on the northern slope of the Brooks Range at the age of 28. Now, scientists have managed to reconstruct intimate details about the life of this extinct individual, which are written in the chemical composition of a tusk it left behind. The bygone mammoth walked an astonishing distance of about 43,000 miles (70,000 kilometers)—equal to nearly twice the circumference of Earth—according to a study published on Thursday in Science. After growing up with its family herd, the male struck out as an adult around age 15 and wandered widely across the northern wilderness for more than a decade until it likely starved to death during a harsh winter or spring season.”

A Key Step for Limiting the Global Temperature Rise to 1.5 Degrees Celsius

More from Scientific American: “The 2015 Paris Agreement called for commitments to hold warming to “well below” 2 degrees C and pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C. Since then, advances in climate science have found that the 2 degree C mark is insufficient to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, strengthening the need for an updated 1.5 degrees C target. Temperatures have already risen by 1.2 degrees C above preindustrial levels, resulting in devastating floods, fires and droughts reflected in distressing daily headlines. Every increment of warming beyond 1.5 degrees C will result in increasingly destructive and costly repercussions, particularly for the most vulnerable communities and countries in low-income and small island states. Now the heat is on the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization that shapes global energy policy, to convey this to its member governments, businesses and markets by centering a 1.5 degrees C–consistent pathway in its widely-read annual publication, the World Energy Outlook (WEO).”

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Thanks for checking in and have a great day! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@dkayserwx) and like me on Facebook (Meteorologist D.J. Kayser).

– D.J. Kayser