This storm is probably going to turn into a monsterous beast. It is almost up to a cat 4 and is just now entering the Gulf where it will confront warm water and air which will pump more and more power into this hellcat like a toddler at the sugar bowl. It's beautifully organized (if a hurricane were really a woman, this one would be Raquel Welch or Pam Grier in the 60s) and poised to do just that. To make matters worse, all the forecast models (there are three that the NOAA folks watch) agree that it will track pretty much straight through the gulf and make landfall in a straight line. It will do this because there are presently no wind currents to push it around counter to it's path or currents called "shears" to weaken it and cause it to become disorganized in any way. That means it looks like it will track straight through the Gulf gaining strength as it goes making landfall around 100 mi. SW of New Orleans. With a storm like this and the potential to become a monster storm, that would be like a direct hit. With it's east to west rotation, the worse of the storm will be piling in from the gulf and slam into New Orleans directly if all goes according to NOAA predictions. People like to dis the National Weather Service, but I've been watching and facinated with hurricanes most of my life and I can tell you they usually aren't too far off. Lately with the internet, I've been able to watch them even more closely and have found that their predictions are less accurate when the computer models disagree and more accurate when they all agree (duh!), and with this one, the models are really, really close in their results.
I'm no meteorologist, but I can't think of anything that is going to prevent this storm from becoming a real bitch of a cat 5.
Let's hope for the sake of the good people of the Gulf coast and the New Orleans area that the gov't has it's shit together this time and is ready to respond like a government should respond to it's people in a crisis. Pray that we don't see any more images of people hungry and thristy and dead bodies of people who died not because of the hurricane, but because of the aftermath and the government that was not ready and unwilling to pull out all the stops and help.
Check out Gustav here: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/flt/t1/loop-vis.html
You can really see what a classic she is.
1 comment:
Hopefully George Bush and John McCain will put the birthday cake away this time and realize those are Americans down there. The Gulf coast can be very beautiful place and at times a killer.
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