Most hurricanes that attain Cat 4-5 status only hold that status for a short time. The conditions necessary for such as strong hurricane as quite rare, as one would expect. My hunch is that the storm was going through an ERC when dry air to its west finally payed a huge toll. A loop of the IR imagery through the early morning (after the GOES eclipse) showed that cloud tops cooled drastically over the western half of the storm. Dry air may have made its way to the inner eye, though other factors may have contributed to the ragged inner eye. Near landfall, the inner eye only ahd about 50-75% coverage (it was open from southwest through east some of the time). As I mentioned in another thread, there was a convective burst immediately at landfall, and cloud tops cooled quickly near the eye, so I do think that it was trying to restregthen. We may have seen a legit Cat 4-5 at landfall had this happened. The strongest wind I've heard was a 135mph gust near Slidell. Given that this was a gust, the sustained wind was probably in the Cat 3 range. I hate it when folks measure a one-second gust and use that speed to classify the hurricane. For example, someone measuring a 80mph gust and say that they have hurricane force winds. Max gusts do not indicate hurricane category as the wind speed thresholds are typically defined... Saffir-Simpson categories are based on sustained winds (>74mph sustained for Cat 1).
