Hurricane Nate continues to struggle with structural issues which have prevented the feared rapid intensification which seemed possible last night. Nate is essentially half a hurricane:
On the east side, it is a strong category 1 hurricane with 90 mph sustained winds. On the west side, it’s barely a tropical storm. In fact, the reconnaissance flights that have been in the storm have struggled to find any valid TS force winds on the west side.
That’s good news for Louisiana as the storm is expected to make landfall either at the mouth of the Mississippi River or else barely miss there and make landfall in Mississippi, perhaps as far east as the MS/AL border. Given the lopsided structure, all the significant weather including hurricane force onshore winds driving possibly a 10 foot or so storm surge will occur east of the official landfall. Strong TS force winds will easily extend into the western half of the Florida panhandle.
Here’s the official forecast track:
Bands should start coming ashore later this afternoon and landfall this evening late tonight, around 10pm to 1am. (Updated to change back to “this evening” … I expected it to slow down a bit but it’s still booking.)
Cat 2 is nothing to sneeze at, but all in all I’m relieved because last night the prospect was there for this to ramp up into something significantly stronger. And given the way this season has gone so far, I was a bit worried about that.
It’s Miami Hurricanes/Florida State game day, so updates may be sparse but I’ll keep an eye out and update with any significant development. GO CANES!