Morning.

Well there was definitely some concern about solar flares starting about a week ago I think.

OK - so 32mb drop in 24 hours (yest this time pressure was 988mb and now 956mb) is explosive deepening. This is what Katrina would have done the first day out of FL, if she had not encountered the difficulties with dry air. Symmetry looks very good on sat and looking at the 10:15Z and she looks very strong, and clearly the signature of a solid Cat 4 "donut" on the visual sat image, even if the pressure has not caught up (and with the next recon I imagine we will see that it has).

Really, really interested to see the first daylight sat image to see the appearance of the CDO and the eye, to get a handle on where she is as far as intensity, because it does look very strong. I would not be surprised if the pressures were down into the mid 940s. That would be a drop of around 45mb in 24 hours! This sounds absurd, I suppose, and I would like to think that I'm not getting carried away into what I felt was an intensity frenzy happening all day yesterday, because I'm basing it on the sat image appearance from this morning, and trying not to speculate.

Now Rita has entered the part of the loop current coming up from the western end of Cuba, and this is the day that I thought she would be strengthening...only I didn't realize she would have already strengthened to a strong Cat 3 before this time. Also she moved faster than I anticipated a couple days ago so I had originally thought she'd be going over this area Wed aft into Thurs am. Luckily her path west at around 24 lat doesn't take her over the more extreme warm portion of the loop current that is up around 26-27 lat, but it seems now that this will be enough to put her at Cat 5 today. So by the end of today, or tomorrow morning, she should be at her strongest over the entire trip through the GOM, and will likely drop in intensity before landfall. However she may not drop enough to significantly reduce storm surge, and may still maintain major hurricane status at landfall.