Monday, July 5, 2010

Consensus is Shifting Northward...

The above infrared satellite image was taken about 30 minutes ago, and depicts the area of disturbed weather (thus far identified as "Tropical Invest 96") that I've been blogging about over the past several days, in the Western Carribean.


[Before I go any further, I'd like to take care of some "housekeeping" type business.  I guess I've always taken for granted that everyone knows that they can "click" on any image that I post in this blog and a larger, hopefully clearer, view will be displayed.  I've had a couple of folks ask me the past few days if I could make the images bigger on the blog.  Turns out they didn't realize they could click for a larger view.  I hope this helps!]


The squiggly (I guess that's a word as the trusty spell checker didn't flag me as a violator) lines spreading Northwest from the center of the disturbance depict the latest track forecasts by the major computer models.  As you can see, the consensus has shifted Northward since the last update, with eventual landfall shown along the middle Texas coast late this week.  Thus far, the models bring this system up to Tropical Storm strength in the Gulf.  As I mentioned in my last post, regardless of tropical storm or hurricane, additional heavy rains could cause siginficant problems across southeast Texas and Mexico should this forecast verify.


One major difference thus far between this system and Alex is that Alex had already become quite organized by this stage.  It will be interesting to see how this system holds-up after traversing the Yucatan peninsula over the next 24-36 hours.  It may have a harder time reorganizing once it emerges back out into the gulf, compared to what Alex was able to do.


Stay tuned!

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