Hanna gets interesting

Tropical Storm Hanna will make for an interesting week next week.

Yesterday TD#8 was upgraded to TS Hanna. Hanna then promptly had it's thunderstorms blown well to the east by shear, leaving the center completely exposed. Since then, thunderstorms have reformed over (well, at least closer to) the center. The shear from the upper level low to the west is expected to relax and allow Hanna to organize and strengthen over the next couple of days.

Many of the forecast models (and the official forecast) take Hanna to about 26 N latitude and 70 W longitude, or about 600 miles SE of Melbourne by Sunday morning. Then things get interesting. Some models effectively stall Hanna near this spot, and a few are starting to turn it to the south. While this would be an unusual track, it has happened before. All of this would be in response to an area of high pressure building in from the north; since Hanna can't go over it and can't go through it, it's gotta go around it. We've even got one model that avoids Florida all together and makes a landfall in the north central Gulf of Mexico which, while neat to look at, is a ten-day forecast making it hard to believe for now.

For now, Hanna still needs to be watched, but things are too uncertain to take any action.

Gustav has moved away from Jamaica and is expected to begin a phase of rapid strengthening as it heads toward western Cuba and for now, the west Louisiana / east Texas portion of the Gulf Coast. There are some variables and uncertainities in Gus' track as well; hopefully some of these will be fleshed out tonight with some special data that will be loaded into tonight's set of model runs (also true for Hanna). Some wind shear is forecast which Gus reaches the Gulf of Mexico, so some weakening is expected, but he should still make landfall as a major hurricane.