might be closing on 3. t-ratings are 5.0 and that's what it's set at.. but those are a little old. earlier i was thinking it would be making landfall about now, but it's not accelerating any more like i thought it would, as well as the fact it's moving wsw at about 240-245 and not due west. looks like the landfall may end up being closer to puerto limon than puerto cabezas. very compact storm... chances are not high the worst of the wind will cross an urban center.
gotta take issue with this quote from the 11pm disco:
THE ANTICIPATED WESTWARD MOTION IS ALREADY IN PLACE AND THIS TURN
WAS BRILLIANTLY FORECAST BY THE GFDL AND BY MOST OF THE GLOBAL
MODELS.
i don't know what planet avila has been on the last couple of days, but gfdl and the whole mess of globals have had this thing going due west from the get go.. and there was about 48 hrs of northward drift they simply didn't capture. not sure how that constitutes 'brilliant'. if the early gfdl was to be believed the storm would already be in the pacific ocean.
speaking of which, if the gfdl is really brilliant then beta will end up making it across to the pacific... as run after run it goes across. a lot of the other globals have it moving ashore further north and drifting through honduras, along a fat cross section of central america. the current sw motion is more in line with the gfs/gfdl crowd, and those models tend to push the storm further wsw and across (though admittedly the gfs has it too weak and kills it after a few hours onshore). i'll stay with the inland camp, but am keeping the possibility in the back of my mind. not a very big storm, and there's nothing to overtly suggest it will survive, even if it makes cat 3 in the next few hours.
the whole 91L mess to the rear has sort of spread out.. a lot of moisture went streaking off on the outflow jet from beta, but some of the residual vorticity is floating along near jamaica. beta will be losing influence over the area, and there is a strong convergence zone in the nw caribbean. final word isn't written on this thing yet, though it has very little chance of doing much.
new 92L looking no worse for wear. there's more convection, but the low cloud motions don't suggest any tightening of the circulation. there could be more going on in the flaring northern part of this feature, as cloud debris is obscuring the low level field. this system is very slowly getting more organized, though globals still don't see much anything to it. it's going to be moving over the warmest waters in the basin within the next two days, so if it's going to develop it'll likely happen before too much longer. there's another energetic low amplitude wave back near 30w, which the globals have roughly the same opinion of. westerlies are finally really chopping up waves above 10n out near the cv region, so the ability of defined waves to feed under the rather resilient subtropical ridge shielding the caribbean is on the wane. pattern shift is underway, and it will probably result in more of the basin becoming closed to development (outside of those nontropical-origin cutoffs that happen from time to time regardless of how the basin looks).
as things stand there's a modest potential for a follow-on to beta next week, with an extremely slim chance of a second. there's also a low but present chance that beta gets into the pacific as a viable entity and garbles the upper pattern evolution that most models are showing.
later everybody.
HF 0457z30october