You know, for what it's worth, I usually take the new generation of "power forecasting" units used by the tv channels with a grain of salt. Names like VIPIR, VORTEX, and TITAN are cute and well chosen names meant to evoke certain psychological reactions in viewers, no doubt.

But, you're right about VIPIR -- granted everything in modeling is merely trying to "fit a curve" to a set of input data, and as such is prone to various errors depending on the methods used. Still, VIPIR last year caught the Charley turn "first" (in terms of tv channels, not the experts on here or elsewhere), along with the pointed out accuracies with Cindy, Ivan, etc. Last night they had VIPIR on our local showing the track run, and at that point (last night) it had Dennis heading towards the eastern LA border.

Merely pointing this out as an observation about models in general. It'll be interesting to watch this system and see how the various models perform, all the while hoping that no one is affected by the system. (Hey, we can wish for a miracle storm breakup, can't we?)