Ike Is A Big Storm

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HOUSTON CHRONICLE ON TWITTER: For those of you that are on Twitter with us, the Chronicle is offering great information and frequent updates on their feed.

AROUND HERE: Any showers around here during the next three days should be very widely spaced as we are under an upper air high. You might see a few showers on radar, but not many, and rain should not be a big problem for high school or college football games (we will have our specific forecast for those games here tomorrow). Afternoon highs will rise into the 89 to 92 degree range through the weekend. And, while our weather stays quiet, all eyes are on…

IKE: Check out the Weather Xtreme video for the Gulf Shores SKYCAM view… and also scan down for images taken from the ground on the Alabama Coast this morning. Ike is a huge storm in terms of the wind envelope; hurricane force winds are about 225 miles in diameter, with tropical storm force winds over 500 miles in diameter! Winds today have gusted to 60 mph at our Gulf Shores SKYCAM.

Winds near the center remain the same; in fact it was very hard for NHC to find surface winds at 100 mph, but they kept them at that level on their last advisory.

I still believe this will be a category three storm at the time of landfall… there is time for the inner core to tighten up. In fact, the GFDL suggests a powerful category four hurricane moving right into Galveston Bay late tomorrow night. The NHC track remains the same, with landfall about 50 miles southwest of Galveston, but it doesn’t make too much sense to focus on that center line with hurricane force winds so far out from the center.

Evacuations continue along the Texas coastal plain this afternoon… J.B. and Bill will keep you updated on that situation.

Ike is a dangerous storm that will impact a large part of the western Gulf coast… tropical storm warnings are up as far east as the Alabama/Mississippi border.

Models have shifted east on Ike’s inland path, and HPC has adjusted the heaviest rain band from Houston to Longview to Fayetteville, and then on to Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. HPC has also reduced the forecast totals down to 5 to 10 inches because the system should continue to move at a pretty good pace as it gets hung up in the westerlies. It now looks like the heaviest rain from Ike will be east of the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

IKE’S IMPACT ON ALABAMA: It still looks like the big rain will remain well west and north of Alabama, although a trailing front on Monday will bring a chance of showers. The rest of next week looks mostly rain-free.

VOODOO LAND: Hey… watch the Weather Xtreme video and you will see a nice upper trough that shows up at the end of the month; maybe that will be the one that brings us our first shot of chilly autumn air.

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We will keep the blog updated with fresh information on Ike… so stay tuned. The next Weather Xtreme video will be posted by 7:00 a.m. tomorrow…

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