Hurricane landfall

[Tim Vasquez]

The legend says it all. Anyone at NHC have the guts to forecast Hurricane Dennis' landfall based on climatology?

Tim

 

[Brandon Clement]

When in doubt just say Pensacola area. I must say that the forecasts have been much better the last 3-4 years(especially in the gulf), but if you look back at the forecast for Hurricane Francis last year you will see they still don't really know. They had it forecast to hit Fl around Miami and then changed it to SC then back to eastern Fl and into the gulf and hit around Ms then they got it right about 24 hrs out. IMO Dennis can hit anywhere from Tampa to Brownsville. It is just a little too far out to be sure, but the best bet is the gulf coast from NO to Appalachiacola.

 

[Matthew K. Hartman]

Ensembles are pointing towards the FL panhandle with the UKMET being a westward outlier. Should be interesting to watch/monitor the intensity models to see how hard Dennis spins up.

Last vortex message (at 1114z) inidicated an estimated 50KT surface wind with a flight level max at 63KTs in the NE quadrant.

BTW: Do vortex messages come out only when recon reports are issued, as supplements?

 

[Tim Vasquez]

I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread.... since I made a tongue-in-cheek comment about the Dennis track I probably should have posted it in Target Area's TALK thread (since we don't allow current forecast comments in Weather & Chasing). Anyway I hope the map is of interest... if I can find a database of historical landfall lat/longs I might try to crunch some numbers and see what kind of neat stats come out.

Tim

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Never mind... a decision was made to allow the forecast posts in W&C now, so I'm unlocking.

 

[Morgan Palmer]

Something that's going to have to be considered with Dennis is the size of the storm. Here's some information from Dr. Jack Beven's webpage which I have shown to many people over the past few years. It's clear that size doesn't matter when it comes to tropical systems.

Hurricanes can come in all shapes and sizes, and the powerful punch these storms pack is usually not dependent on the size. Here's an example which contrasts two notorious hurricanes of the 1990's.

http://www.mindspring.com/~jbeven/intr0012.htm

 

[Matthew K. Hartman]

Good point, Morgan...

Hurr. Gilbert in '88 (hopefully I have the year correct) was very small in size, but so compact that it's central pressure deepened to unprecedented levels (if I remember right the second lowest recorded in the Atlantic) while in contrast, Ivan last year was nearly as big as the state of Texas, churning out over almost the entire GoM. And we all know what happened there...

Be safe to those of you that decide to head south for interception, it will be nasty, either way.

Regards -