page_title: Meteorological history of Hurricane Patricia
section_title: Landfall and dissipation
hierarchical_section_title: Meteorological history of Hurricane Patricia / Landfall and dissipation
caption_attribution_description: English: This image was taken by GOES East at 1445Z on October 24, 2015.
context_page_description: Hurricane Patricia was the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere and the second-most intense worldwide in terms of barometric pressure. It also featured the highest one-minute maximum sustained winds ever recorded in a tropical cyclone. Originating from a sprawling disturbance near the Gulf of Tehuantepec in mid-October 2015, Patricia was first classified a tropical depression on October 20. Initial development was slow, with only modest strengthening within the first day of its classification. The system later became a tropical storm and was named Patricia, the twenty-fourth named storm of the annual hurricane season. Exceptionally favorable environmental conditions fueled explosive intensification on October 22. A well-defined eye developed within an intense central dense overcast and Patricia grew from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in just 24 hours—a near-record pace. The magnitude of intensification was poorly forecast and both forecast models and meteorologists suffered from record-high prediction errors.
context_section_description: Late on October 23, radar imagery depicted the formation of a secondary outer eyewall, indicative of an eyewall replacement cycle. By 20:30 UTC, the final pass by reconnaissance, the hurricane's flight-level winds fell by 60 mph (95 km/h) and its central pressure rose at 8 mbar (hPa; 0.24 inHg) per hour. Coinciding with the eyewall replacement cycle was an increase in southwesterly wind shear, a factor that further accelerated Patricia's degradation. The hurricane's eye soon became cloud-filled and rapid weakening ensued at an unprecedented pace.
  At 23:00 UTC, the cyclone made landfall at Cuixmala in the municipality of La Huerta, Jalisco—about 55 mi (85 km) west-northwest of Manzanillo—with winds of 150 mph (240 km/h) and an estimated pressure of 932 mbar (hPa; 27.49 inHg). This made Patricia the strongest hurricane to strike Mexico's Pacific coast, exceeding an unnamed storm in 1959 and Madeline in 1976 (the latter of which has not been reanalyzed). Although Patricia was operationally thought to have made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 165 mph (270 km/h) and a pressure of 920 mbar (hPa; 27.17 inHg), reanalysis of available data suggested that the hurricane weakened more rapidly than originally thought: an automated station in Cuixmala measured a pressure of 934.2 mbar (hpa; 27.54 inHg), while Josh Morgerman in Emiliano Zapata, just inside the eye of Patricia, measured a pressure of 937.8 mbar (hPa; 27.70 inHg). His observations also indicated a pressure gradient of 11 mbar (hPa; 0.32 inHg) per nautical mile.
  Patricia's winds at landfall are relatively uncertain, and the 150 mph (240 km/h) value is based upon the Knaff-Zehr-Courtney pressure-wind relationship and an extrapolation of a 54 mbar (hPa; 1.59 inHg) filling using the Dvorak Technique. An additional equation stemming from work by Willoughby (1993) yielded a landfall intensity of 147 mph (237 km/h). A NOAA automated weather station at the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve, at an elevation of 280 ft (85 m), recorded sustained winds of 185 mph (298 km/h) and a maximum gust of 211 mph (340 km/h). Further raw data from this station indicated unrealistically high sustained winds of 266 mph (428 km/h) and a maximum gust of 1,138 mph (1,831 km/h). Based on the station's distance from Patricia's eye, outside the radius of maximum winds, the observations from this station are considered unreliable. The highest reliably measured winds of 98 mph (158 km/h) occurred in Pista between 22:30 and 23:00 UTC on October 23 before the anemometer failed.
  Even faster weakening ensued through October 24 as the hurricane traversed the Sierra Madre mountains; its eye disappeared from satellite imagery within hours of moving ashore. The system weakened below hurricane strength by 03:00 UTC as it passed west of Guadalajara. Patricia accelerated inland between a trough over Northwestern Mexico and the ridge over the Gulf of Mexico. Convection dramatically decreased in organization and the low- and mid- to upper-level circulation centers of the cyclone soon decoupled. The system degraded into a tropical depression by 12:00 UTC as little organized convection remained, and the storm dissipated shortly thereafter over central Mexico. Unimpeded by the mountains of Mexico, the mid- to upper-level circulation of Patricia, accompanied by considerable moisture, continued northeast and interacted with a cold front over the western Gulf of Mexico. The new system produced flooding rains across large areas of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
caption: The remnants of Patricia—shortly after dissipation as a tropical cyclone—and a frontal boundary draped across the western Gulf Coast on October 24
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