Okay, I'm making my inaugural 2004 post, so be kind to me!

I'm sitting in the bulls-eye of this sucker in Lakeland, FL, which is right about under the current white line for the storm track. Lucky me. I'm in an apartment, which is at least a little improvement over the mobile home from a year ago.

Anyway, I went back and looked at the recon data from Charley over the last 3 runs I could find (0017Z, 0212Z, and 0404Z), and Charley is definitely moving overall 297, with steps of 292 from 0017Z-0212Z and 305 from 0212Z-0404Z. (Based on their fixes, and using the WGS84 earth model to do the bearing calculations.)

To me, that makes me think (I'm a total amateur, my degree is in Math, not met!) there's the northwestern turn beginning, but since we're only talking about 3 fixes over 4 total hours, it's hard to say if it's a trend or a wobble.

What really interested me was the recon's description of the eyewall characteristic. In the first two recon fixes I looked at, they held fast at C8, meaning circular with 8nm diameter. This most recent, despite dropping pressure, is showing a wider C10 eye. Huh. Beats me. And check out the max winds reported. Back 4 hours ago, it was 60kt, 2 hours ago, it was 76kt, and just now they only got 47kt. Weird. Did they just not find it, or is there some sort of nighttime sleep going on with Charley?

Tomorrow's gonna be a long day for those of us in C. Fla. I've watched them come and pass by for 13 years or so, but this one's just got that feeling. May be heading to Home Depot tomorrow to figure out how I can shelter up the apartment what with the rules the complex has on permanently nailing/screwing into the walls. Heh.

Oh, some links for those who want some more info, which I found with some scrounging online:

For anybody else watching along with me, here's two links that are handy for reading these things and figuring math out:

Recon Data Explanation
Calculating Lat/Long Distances & Bearings

Londovir