Cat 3 Kat Heading towards New Orleans or Biloxi?

My money is on New Orleans.. even a bit worried on Sabine Pass area if Katrina keeps moving west. Not because she is moving west but because she isn't responding so fast to the front that should be tugging her north already. Then again.. she is a big storm and it's a small front. Every day, every way.. I grow more amazed. Basically the only thing I can say on Katrina, on life..our life anyway.

Watched Katrina grow and swallow up most of the Gulf of Mexico today on The Weather Channel on Mute. Something I do sometimes on Shabbos, just mute it.. leave it .. like a private satellite loop... lava lamp for weather people. I look over. Stare.. amazed. Can imagine what they are saying and more curious on what my friends online and offline are saying. What can they say? She will soon be moving towards the Central Gulf and headed for that most special, much loved piece of real estate called New Orleans. The Big Easy. My grandma called in Nawlins.. though she threw a R in there somewhere. Nahwrlins.. sort of. She lived there for a while as a young girl in the Garden District. Grandma Mary. Conceived in Key West. Grew up in Tampa. Some pre-teen time in New Orleans. A woman of the South and a family tied to tobacco.. cigars, leaf tobacco, shade tobacco.. Ybor City. Very colorful girl. And, she was always worried on getting one of those bad storms.

And, now.. so many people around the Gulf of Mexico are worried tonight on the same thing. Thinking the same thing..

It's a very scary scenario. One that I actually was insistent on Friday afternoon as it's been my feeling that Katrina would make the New Orleands area her next destination. Not totally convinced she doesn't want to redo Camille.. what self-respecting Hurricane doesn't want to do that? But, believe Katrina is her own girl with her own mind and doubt she wants to be a Camille #2. But, she might.. she could. She could also head just west of New Orleans into some of the Parishes that I love to travel through the most. Somewhere between New Orleans and the Sabine River would be an outlying left field worry.

I just don't see her doing Florida again and Mobile is a bit too close to Florida. That front would have to intensify, dip deeper and faster with a veracity that would catch her attention. It's a bit too mediocre to grab her interest. If anything it looks like it's falling into her not the other way around. Also.. if you look at the Water Vapor loop you will see that the main energy of the front is beginning to punch EAST into Ohio and NOT SE. And, that is within the range of normal as it is still August. There is a bottom part of the front but it's filling in and not punching down as much as sliding south. It should have an influence on Katrina. For sure. But, how much?

This is a timing nightmare for the Hurricane Center and every little National Weather Service along the way. Somewhere, someone.. a lot of someones are going to get slammed by Katrina.

We can only hope that she will peak sooner rather than later (before landfall) and she will cross some little eddy of cool water, a small pool of cool water and lose a bit of her strength. Either way.. her storm tide is going to be pushing, shoving, crashing onto the beaches of the Gulf Coast and there is nothing anyone can do about that. Local knowledge of topography of the beaches and beach bottoms will be on the utmost importance to ..........to.........well, prepare for disaster and the specific disaster.

Oh...disaster... a bad star. That is what that means.

Oh... music. Can't Live... if living is without you .. Can't give... can't give anymore.. (but he does) but I can't forget this evening as you were leaving... your face as you were leaving.. you always smile (i always smile) ... Can't Live... this song always got to me. Gets to so many of us I am sure who have lost love and can't breathe when we think about what we have lost. That is why art is so universal and grabs us all in the gut.

Sorry, listening to an unreal CD a ... friend made me. They spared me by putting on a cute softer song.

Katrina, where was I?

She's gonna hit land with a surprising punch and I say that because she has had that history. Storms do have histories. Cleo destroyed the islands before moving on to play hop scotch with Cuba and hit Miami stronger than expected. David... Hugo.. The big ones do that.. they get a taste for blood and have a storm history.

Andrew
http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/1992/ANDREW/track.gif
Betsy
http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/1965/index.html

No.. not hyping. Being very honest. If we don't learn from the past.. Study it.. we have wasted our lives here on this planet. Learn, study, revise, write... that is what they are doing with the Best Track Team you know that don't you? It's not just some goverment slush fund to keep weather people busy during the off-season. They study, they learn things they didn't know before and the revise.. rewrite.. they do a damn good job.

So.. on Friday morning I said she would go to Louisianna. Deep down felt that. I could be wrong. We all could because...hurricanes are fluid, live theatre at it's best. Nothing better than Storm Tracking and Weather People. Makes reality tv seem boring. We are all so complex, different, intriquing, left brain and right brain all rolled up together in one brain. Few people are but we are.. You see scientist types who track hurricanes and other earth sciences we won't mention.. are in love with the drama of nature, the world.. the mix of history and power and life unfolding as we watch. Click on the storm. Click on an earthquake link. Click back on a water vapor. It is about NOW and HERE and HAPPENING. Not about danger or some need for a thrill. No.. people always get that wrong. We are the people who see science as an ongoing ballet on a grand stage played out and photographed by satelittes high in the sky .. sending live pictures down to our laptops. We watched NASA shoot spacecraft up into the air and got high watching tracking imagery ... we love maps, we love wind, we love change and movement and music. Never met a storm chaser who wasn't nuts about music or radio or both. Why I once had some storm chaser electric company guy tell me the reason he liked working up there in those bucket trucks was because he was closer to the clouds. When asked what he liked about Miami he thought and said, "good radio stations." Not your typical answer. We aren't typical people.

Long paragraph .. needs editing.

Oh well.... not in the mood to edit tonight.

Want to look at some Key West Blogs tomorrow. Story that is getting lost in the shuffle here.

Want to mention that Beven did a bang up job on Thursday morning with his discussion. Re-read it and realized he really wanted to say more on the possible SW track of Katrina. Good writing and even better forecasting, as always.

Want to say here that I keep remembering Katrina being born.. just off shore. I remember when she was a blob, then a bigger blob and then she just poof disapeered and looked as if she was going to fall apart. One dot formed in the middle of what used to be convection but pretty much disapeered. And, the dot grew..and grew. It became purple on enhanced IR and expanded. It was clear to me (anyway) she was about to go through some explosive growth phase as she sat over the Gulfstream. We got real lucky she didn't grow more. Some thought she might be falling apart.

In Kabbalah there is a theory called Tzsimson (probably spelled that wrong) and it is where power contracts.. things contract and then explode out. The contraction is sort of needed to get bigger. Many ways of explaining it and I can't now at this hour when my mind is exhausted from a very interesting night of music, feverish text messages, a story on a flight into Hugo and trying to keep up with trackers who have had professional educations in meteorology where I have only had a class or two. Crazy night.. unreal beautiful songs and the most beautiful tropical girl I have seen in ages dancing in the Gulf of Mexico.

The ironies of life.. have to go to Unisys to find the history links from the past that I like.

Who knew that class on oceanography that I took to understand currents off of Peru and the Firth of Forth for International Relations and International Law would come so in hand years later with tracking hurricanes.

Who knew what would happen just because I wanted to go online to talk about the weather.. learn really...study.. get better info..

Who knew that music like writing has it's own unique signature. Who knew that words written and saved could be read again and images offline of people and the moon would match up so perfectly like.. two pieces in a puzzle.

Dreamers and schemers and scientific minds playing games online, reading through posts and picking up data like a child picking up driftwood on a beach after a storm. And to the mind of such a child... those pieces of driftwood would become keys to journeys far away.. stories, fantasies.. ships out at sea and places they had drifted from.

Stay away from my beach crazy boy!

Going to bed. Thank you for the music my wonderful friend.

Thank you for reading this mixed up bag of weather and oh what is that phrase they love to use about my writing.. don't remember, don't know.. they stunned my mind tonight so I am going to go lie down and instead of watching a progression of fronts flickering across my screen I am going to stare at Katrina until I fall asleep.

Last thought on this particular CD and History.. If we don't learn from history we are condemned to repeat it. Not this girl. Not me. If I have the chance to love again.. like that. Not going to walk away. Not going to react..and if I do I will react back faster. Got to know when to hold them, when to fold them, when to play and when to go and you have to know not to walk away from love. Because I don't want to live in a World Without Love.

Bobbi ...going to bed.. no more txt messages ... please .............and..........
track below from online.. see? my mind is still doing weather ;)
http://www.skeetobiteweather.com/imagelinkbeta.asp?image=AL902005