Katia Atlantic Shootout

CALLING all photographers, submit your pics of Hurricane Katia swell to win FCS travel gear plus a photographic commission. We're looking for your best efforts at capturing Hurricane Katia's ferocity.

Forecast to roll up and round the Atlantic, Katia, is a heavy low of cyclonic power which should deliver surf to most of the North Atlantic rim as it makes the rare transition to an extratropical hurricane (warm to cold core) and spins out towards Europe.

Top three efforts win a pile of primo gear from FCS, plus the top shooter gets a bells and whistles commission for magicseaweed.

You can upload your pics HERE we'll consider all images uploaded from the region as eligible until the swell stops. We'll be running galleries of all your images as they drop in before notifying you of the final submission deadline (probably around mid September). All photos need to be 1000px at their widest point.

You can add to the selection using the 'Hurricane' tag.

Katia swell hitting Barbabos ... Yesterday© 2011 - TarikB

Hurricane Katia has already started to deliver decent clean ground swell to much of the Western rim of the Atlantic. As the storm develops our eyes turn to its future as it moves north. Fuelled by warm seas and humid air, tropical storms normally die a death as they head north, occasionally seeing a second life as a conventional cold core system as they hit the jetstream somewhere between Canada and Greenland.

In this case the storm hits an unseasonably low jet, forecast to sit between North Carolina and New York and with an intense jet streak intensifying and drawing the system up north east past Ireland. The result is good potential for a transition from warm to cold core for this storm while maintaining Hurricane intensity.

The result - potentially significant swell for Europe as well as the US and Canada. Uncomfortably large for Ireland and the UK, serious for mainland Europe and sending a blast of unseasonably early long period swell down as far as Morocco.

As we mentioned in our last update this is all still theory. The storm hasn't changed track yet and if things change the swell isn't yet on it's way, but the signs are generally positive with good model consensus for the storms development.

The projected path of Hurricane Katia© 2011 - National Hurricane Centre

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