The ULL and Ridge presently in place and Trough coming are the flies in the ointment, as noted.

My concern here is that people from Mid-Texas up around to roughly Mobile are basically blowing this off, and people further east are simply ignoring this storm entirely.

While the probabilities favor the NHC's general solution, I am not yet sold.

With the general premise that Hurricanes move towards the weakest atmospheric feature, a fracture in that ridge or worse, a trough that displaces it (if it gets here in time) could be really ugly. Now add the ULL into that and things potentially get even worse.

The GFDL has been all over the place with this storm (http://moe.met.fsu.edu/tcgengifs/) and as recently as 18 hours ago was looking directly at this potential, aiming at the middle of Lousiana! Now its after the SW edge of Texas. This sort of wild fluctuation tells me that the models have a SEVERE problem at present getting a handle on the interaction of these features,

I would not write off this storm in terms of the track holding; we should have a much better handle on this come Sunday, but that means you've only got a couple of days to get your act together! If you need wood or supplies and are in the Gulf - anywhere in the Gulf - DO IT NOW.

I am personally completing preparations for my ability to skedaddle (and I'm near Destin) TODAY. The odds are very low that this storm comes this far to the east, BUT I do not like the uncertainties in the atmosphere right now as the interactions are too complex for me to buy a single solution at the present time.

Further, anything that gets into the Gulf without serious interaction with land first (e.g. not going over much of the Yucatan or much of Cuba - basically shooting the straights) is going to be really bad simply due to oceanic heat content. The Gulf is virtually a HOTTUB right now - up here in the Northern Gulf we've had a couple of solid weeks of near-100F weather with few breaks and surface temperatures are extremely high, with the thermocline breaks being unusually deep. As such I'm deeply concerned about the heat content and thus the fuel available to sustain an extremely strong storm.

Is it really bad if you have a full tank of gas in the car and the storm doesn't come your way?