Ivan roars back to life, poised to strike Gulf Coast

By Knight Ridder Newspapers and The Associated Press

NOAA Tropical Storm Ivan, left, is in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday. Hurricane Jeanne is at center, with Hurricane Karl at right. Not shown is Tropical Storm Lisa, to Karl's right.

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A resilient piece of Hurricane Ivan, the storm that viciously assaulted the Gulf Coast last week, looped over the Atlantic, passed over Florida, returned to the Gulf of Mexico, redeveloped into a tropical depression and appeared poised yesterday for another attack on the Gulf Coast as a system called ...

Well, the next tropical storm or hurricane should be called Matthew, but it took hours of debate to decide if this one was the next one or one of the last ones.

Forecasters finally decided last night that it had regained enough strength to require a name, and that they must call it Tropical Depression Ivan. Again. The return of Ivan.

Late yesterday, Ivan was upgraded to a tropical storm, with sustained winds near 40 mph, prompting warnings in Louisiana and southeastern Texas.

The storm was expected to make landfall sometime tonight.

	ALAN DIAZ / AP Residents of Pensacola Beach, Fla., pass an SUV buried in sand as they head for their homes to inspect damage from Hurricane Ivan. Yesterday was the first day beach residents were allowed to return.

"I don't think there is any question that if you could examine the DNA of this system, Ivan's DNA would be in there," said forecaster James Franklin of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

There's more:

• Hurricane Jeanne, already responsible for hundreds of deaths in Haiti and others in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, is completing a full, 360-degree pirouette nearly 700 miles east of Florida. It is likely to head toward the Bahamas and the mainland again.

Forecasters said the most likely target seemed to be the Carolinas, although much of Florida fell within the cone of probability. High surf and riptides already swept South Florida's coast.

• Far out to sea, Tropical Storm Lisa and a developing, unnamed system are competing for dominance over the same sprawling patch of the Atlantic. One might win, essentially digesting the other. Or they could two-step around each other for a while.

In fact, tropical systems are dancing all around the ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Among them is Hurricane Karl, which stayed on an open-ocean course that threatened only shipping. But it is the resurgent Ivan that is attracting much of the interest and amazement.

Even forecasters are shaking their heads. This sort of thing rarely happens, especially involving a storm as ferocious as Ivan — and this long after everyone thought it was dead.

This is what happened: The lower portion of the spinning air at the center of Ivan broke away from the higher portion late last week and went its own way — east and then south — as the rest of the storm went north.

That piece of "vorticity" twisted itself over Florida, delivering some rain Tuesday, and then moved back over the Gulf of Mexico, where it began redeveloping in earnest yesterday, producing thunderstorms and tropical-storm force gusts.

As for what it would be called, forecasters spent much of the day examining the rule book.

"Our operating instructions say, 'Within a basin, if the remnant of a tropical cyclone redevelops into a tropical cyclone, it is assigned its original number or name,' " said Max Mayfield, the hurricane center's director.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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