it's a dumb name, but it popped into my head the other night when i was looking at those tracks across florida, then bending back to the west. guidance keeps leaning further to the right in the short term so i guess it's time to start contemplating this idea some.... that the storm makes a sort of stretched S-type path and goes over the state, getting off the east coast enough to perhaps reintensify some. it isn't arcing way out into the eastern gulf like i was earlier worried, and now seems to be fighting to not start drifting northeastward... so that it may not even go in above naples. a goodly number of the models are showing slow movement and favorable atmospheric conditions if the system gets over the atlantic... so even though i feel sorta nuts saying this, folks further up the coast, say in the usually-ignored-by-hurricanes cape canaveral to cape romain swath of coastline... keep your peepers on this one. if it's 50-100 off jacksonville on thursday morning and drifting in the sauna out there we may get more of a storm up the coast than the official forecast shows.
in the short term, have noticed that the storm is slowly consolidating, with an oblong and almost dual center spinning around like a peanut on radar. the core convection is trending upward, with the banding features on the eastern side perhaps slowly strengthening. it doesn't make a whole lot of difference whether it strengthens to hurricane force before landfall, because the winds are going to be over the keys, coastal waters, glades.. maybe over okeechobee. most of peninsular florida will get several inches of rain.. maybe a dozen or more in a few places. these slow movers that are elongated like this always do plenty of that. it looks pretty certain what the lower half of florida is in for... at this point the forecast questions are much less certain on the effects further north.. just a rainy depression for ga/sc, or maybe a regenerated system from offshore? i'm dying to know... it's really hard to get any *real* tropical weather in my neck of the woods, because it would have to be a very vigorous gulfside system that moves in to the northeast really fast (think opal 100 mi east), or one of those rare, mercurial atlantic hurricanes that decided to blast into georgia or lower sc with serious intensity (think hugo 100 miles west). there's a fleeting chance i might get... barely something. that goes in the wow category for this amateur forecaster. you coast dwelling sadists probably think that's pathetic, and coast dwelling hurricane-haters maybe wish they could borrow my odds.
HF 0046z19august