I think Irene will turn out to sea. I'm fairly certain of that now. The persistent northerly center reformations that have occured over the last day or so have effectively killed any chance of Irene coming westward. I had some small doubts about recurvature yesterday, but the recent events have satisfied those doubts.

To be very honest, Irene's chances of a US landfall ended on Friday morning. The increasing shear and significant center reformation (12 N to nearly 17 N) ended any major US threat from Irene. To add to that, a storm in the process of recurving along with a storm developing in the deep tropics generally isn't a good pattern for the developing system to get very far west. The stage needs to be clear, so to speak.