Rick I was definitely not seeing the ability to strengthen over the last 24 hour period that has just occured, because of a couple things I'll mention below. But I also don't care for the hunger for hype, and hunger for devastation. You only have to drive 60 miles to the west of you to be reminded of the eastmost edge of a horrible trail of coastline devastation that extends all the way to the tip of LA, so you would think people would have had enough, and wouldn't crave more. I've never understood that national cultural bent of the last 20 or so years.

It was not clear to me how much SSTs could support increased convection even with the increase in speed, without significant depths of warmer water, also I didn't pick up on the wind shear forecast to be as low as it turned out, but mainly I have begun to think since last night that the most important factor, which I knew about but which I did not put in proper order of importance, is the large anti-cyclonic movement in the upper atmosphere over the GOM. I now think this is the main factor beyond anything else in the past 24 hours that has facilitated strengthening, not the depth of warm water or lack of depth. I think this is key to whether high-intensity storms can form over the GOM.

I had always anticipated however that strengthening would occur during the time period we are in now, where the deeper warm waters exist in the southern GOM. So I think we'll definitely see continued strengthening right up until this evening.