Heavy rains hit Mexico as Hurricane Polo tracks offshore, expected to make landfall on Sunday night

(Corrects wind speed in paragraph 2, rainfall amounts and geographic areas in paragraphs 7)

Sept 24 (Reuters) - Heavy surf ​and rain lashed southwestern Mexico as "extremely powerful" Hurricane Polo crawls northwest offshore the mainland, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in a bulletin on Thursday.

With maximum sustained winds ‌near 155 miles per hour (250 kph) Polo has been classified last as a Category 4 storm, a notch down from ⁠level 5, the highest level on the ​Saffir-Simpson scale, which it had previously reached.

As the ⁠NHC keeps adjusting the storm's force, it said it could see some near-term strengthening and ‌is expected to remain a ‌major hurricane for the next few days.

AccuWeather, a private forecaster, expected Polo to ⁠make landfall late Sunday night into Monday, to lose ⁠some steam and to reach a Category 2 hurricane as it tracks across the Baja California peninsula north of Cabo San Lucas, where local authorities have already begun restricting beach access and closing the local harbor.

The NHC said that Polo's outer rainbands are spreading onshore and producing heavy rains. Tropical-storm-force winds are likely occurring along the coast of ‌southwestern Mexico, it said.

Polo's hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 40 ​miles (65 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 125 miles (205 km).

Additional rainfall totals of 2 inches to 4 inches (50.8 mm to 101.6 mm), with isolated maximum totals up to 6 inches, are expected across across coastal portions of the Mexican states of Michoacan, Colima, northern and southern Jalisco, and Nayarit.

"These swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf, rip currents, and coastal flooding," said the NHC.

AccuWeather hurricane expert Nicholas Arman said ​that if the hurricane stays on the expected track, some rain and moisture can be pulled into Texas.

"This ‌is textbook El ‌Niño impacts where ⁠the strong tropical development in the Pacific ultimately pushes moisture into the southwestern US," he said

How much rain and moisture reaches Texas depends on the storm's ability to cross the Sierra Madre mountains, a major mountain range system which runs northwest–southeast through northwestern and western Mexico, and along ‌the Gulf of California.

"The Sierra ​Madre often act like a cheese grater to an ‌organized system, shredding it apart ⁠and preventing any ​organized tropical feature from staying together," Arman added.

(Reporting by Paolo Laudani; Editing by Anthony Esposito, Emelia Sithole-Matarise ​and Iñigo Alexander)

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