Hurricane Ike

The latest projection of hurricane Ike’s path puts a tropical storm right over our house sometime early Sunday morning.  Of course, that’s just a projection based on current conditions and input from a half dozen climate models.  The storm could still move considerably north or south of its projected track.

I typically rely on the National Hurricane Center for information about hurricanes and tropical storms, and the Navy/NRL Tropical Cyclone Page for satellite pictures.  I recently learned about this Tropical Cyclones page, which has a whole bunch of graphs and images from many different places.  Not only does it have the graphs, it also has links to the pages the graphs came from.  I didn’t realize there were so many different hurricane tracking sites out there.

I especially liked this image, which shows Ike’s historical track and its projected path.  I’ve cropped it to show my area.  Click on it to get the full-sized image.

A tropical storm here shouldn’t be too big a deal.  Although Ike is expected to be a major hurricane when it makes landfall, we’re about 200 miles inland.  The storm will lose a lot of its intensity in the 24 hours between when it hits the coast and when we begin to enjoy it.  I expect some high winds, but not enough to do major damage.  And we certainly could use some rain.  I suspect, though, that we’ll get too much too soon and there will be some flash flooding.

I wouldn’t want to be in the grocery store between Thursday and Sunday.  People around here tend to panic when they see a storm coming, even though it’s highly unlikely that we’ll lose power or suffer other storm related inconvenience.  You do not want to be the only thing between the last case of bottled water and a woman who has visions of hurricane Katrina in her mind.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more injuries resulting from the pre-storm supermarket rush than from the storm itself.

All told, it should be an interesting weekend.