Saturday Hurricane Dorian Update

Good morning. Hurricane Dorian is currently a very powerful Cat 4 storm with winds at the center of over 140mph..

The models are starting to shift towards the curve off the Florida coast scenario....

Although this is not set in stone, it makes sense given where historical storms have tracked. If this holds true, Florida avoids a direct impact.

The best case scenario is that the whole storms center stays off the east coast but as you can see, now everyone from NC south needs to be on alert.

The National Hurricane Center agrees...

Why the shift off the Florida coast in latest model runs?

As you can see below, the trend in the models has been to weaken the Atlantic high pressure ridge (red) giving the storm a possible escape path...

This is going to be a very close call. If the storm center stays off mainland then this will be manageable. If it makes landfall or if its center rides the coast, then we have problems. I say right now its a 50/50.

The hurricane models show how close a call this is...

The issue of why this will continue to be a forecast headache is that the storm is forecast to temporally stall just off the Florida coast later this weekend. This creates more forecast lag time between now and potential impact along the east coast.

Stay tuned, there is a lot to track.