Post-tropical Cyclone Rachel Makes Landfall in Baja California, Impacts Southeast US
While many of the nation’s meteorological eyes have been along the Gulf Coast as Isaias made just the first Atlantic hurricane landfall of 2026, that wasn’t the only part of the continental United States to be impacted by a tropical system this weekend. In the evening of October 10, the storm formerly known as Hurricane Rachel made its landfall in the far northern part of Baja California, and San Diego experienced some of its impact.
Rachel had been as strong as a Category 3 storm while it was in the warm waters of the Pacific found to the south of the Gulf of California. However, as it propagated to the north, it moved over the relatively cool waters of the California Current. Even in an El Niño year, this current (which originates well to the north adjacent to British Columbia) runs cold. Water adjacent to southern California and Baja California in Mexico was around 22-24 C, or 72-75 F, as can be seen in the following map from the NOAA Physical Sciences Lab.
As a result, Rachel’s intensity peaked several days earlier, as captured by the CIMSS D-MINT satellite intensity product. By the time it reached the shore, it was well into tropical storm status.
The devolution of Rachel is quite easy to see from the satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) winds from Canada’s RADARSAT. Remember, these can only tell the speed of the wind, and numerical weather prediction analyses are used to overlay wind directions on top of the SAR imagery. Still, we can see that as of 8 October (Thursday) Rachel still had a notable eye.
By the time landfall was imminent, however, the structure was far more ragged and there was no obvious circulation pattern. Here’s the SAR wind imagery from 11 October 2026, three days later. Note the very different structure in the wind speed and the lack of a classic tropical shape to the wind field.
Here’s the Band 13 (10 micron) animation from GOES-18 (GOES West) for the afternoon and evening of Saturday, 10 October. Again, this looks far less like a tropical system than it did a few days earlier when it was at its maximum strength of Category 3.
The approach of Rachel caused the National Hurricane Center to issue a tropical storm watch for San Diego County, California, just the second ever tropical storm watch issued for the state of California (The first was Hurricane Hilary in 2023). Flooding has been a concern for the southeast United States with flash flood warnings issued for Las Vegas and southwestern and central Utah.