Great Christmas Hurricane

The Great Christmas Hurricane was a highly unusual storm that caused very severe damage to doowntown areas of Tampa, FL, causing great loss of life due to its very small size and Christmas Day landfall, with tropical storm force winds only extending 20 miles (32.2 km) from the centre and hurricane force winds extending a mere 6.5 miles (10.5 kilometres) from the centre and a radius of maximum winds of just 4 miles, with the eye consequentially being less than one mile (1.6 km) wide at certain points in its life.

Formation
On December 19, 2021, a small trough of low pressure collided with a highly unusual and weak tropical wave south of Cuba. Convection was very low around the system until early on December 22, when a pocket of very low wind shear and unusually high SSTs caused the system to begin developing convection rapidly. By December 23 06:00 UTC, the system only had a 20/30 chance of development from the NHC. Despite this, the system rapidly organized, with a recon plane finding a centre at roighly 17:00 UTC. This resulted in the system being declared Tropical Depression Nineteen at 18:00 UTC on December 23. The system was extremely small.

First stages of life
Initially, the storm remained stable as the low-level circulation popped in and out of the convection due to varying wind shear and air moisture levels. However, the storm entered another pocket of low wind shear, high air moisture, and relatively high OHC and RH for the time of year 18 hours later and intensifiation began. Due to the system's extremely small size, intensification was extremely rapid.

Explosive intensification
The storm began explosively intensifying at 12:00 UTC on December 24, when a second recon mission found winds of 45 mph (72 km/h). This resulted in the storm being upgraded to Tropical Storm Rose. At this time, it was expected that the storm would make landfall as a 60 mph (97 km/h) tropical storm. However, the storm instead explosively intensified due to unusually good conditions and an extremely small size, with the wind speed jumping 20 mph (32km/h; 17 kt) every six hours for 24 hours, beginning at 60 mph (97 km/h) at 18:00 UTC December 24, and ending at 120 mph.