Erin is due north of Puerto Rico this morning, with rain bands causing gusty winds and rain across both PR and the Virgin Islands …
As always your best source of information is the National Hurricane Center, and their Key messages regarding Hurricane Erin (en Español: Mensajes Claves) is a great place to get an overview of the situation. The 5am Sunday forecast hasn’t changed much, with a nudge to the west, but basically not that different from yesterday. Erin remains a very powerful storm despite some intensity fluctuations, and given the expanding size of the storm tropical storm warnings have been issued for the Turks and Caicos and southwestern Bahamas:
Erin seems to be going through an eyewall replacement cycle as well as other structural changes that caused the intensity to drop some, but the overall environment remains favorable so it should recover as it continues its turn to the north. The track models are all pretty consistent on this. I again want to remind everyone that storms “wobble”, and you have to watch for trends over at least 6-12 hours before jumping to any conclusions. Yesterday I saw excited reports about the storm tracks shifting west. Yes, like the undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration reported by Dr. Ray Stanz, it did move, but not much. Here is the current track forecast and position fixes over the last 6 hours or so. As you can see, the fixes “wobble” and different sources give different fixes as well (blue markers are satellite, the “radar” screen markers are radar fixes from San Juan, the airplanes from hurricane hunter fixes). So be careful about reports of track shifts. They do happen, and are sometimes dramatic, but not this time. Don’t over-react because somebody drops a few points on a map out of context.
Erin looks to “thread the needle” in between Hatteras and Bermuda, with the US East coast seeing some heavy surf (and that means rip currents), and Bermuda probably getting some wind and rain in addition to waves. Here’s my TAOS(tm) TC impact swath estimate, economic impact likely to be under $50 Million USD, almost all due to disruptions, although some beach erosion and coastal infrastructure damage from waves, and minor flash flooding impacts are in the estimate.
Taking a wider view, there are two disturbances on NHC’s Tropical Weather Outlook. The first, off the coast of North Carolina, is given a very generous 10% chance of tropical formation. The other , a wave coming off of Africa, has better long term potential but is still only 20% over the next week.
As usual, seeing lots of long range model mayhem. Let’s deal with what we know, Erin, and who is being impacted now (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the southwest Bahamas/Turks and Caicos), and don’t worry about what’s next since despite all the convincing looking model pictures we don’t have any actionable forecasts on that. You probably wouldn’t plan a picnic based on a two week forecast, you probably shouldn’t plan your hurricane angst on it either.
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