Watching Earl Moving...From down below... Earl's Bands Move Onshore

Loop the loop to see how slow the front is moving and how Earl sits at 75 and enjoy the entertainment Nature is providing free but for the cost of your Internet connection ;)

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/eaus/flash-jsl.html

up close he looks on fire...doesn't he?



Amazing to watch the outflow from a storm this large, this historic and so far away move through your area. Watched a few times in Miami when some big, Gulf storm slide by to the west and you saw it briefly, but this was better.

Picture the whole sky blue at sunrise, some light local fog at the end of the cul de sac, slowly dissipating. You look up towards the east, before the sun has climbed very high in the sky and the whole edge of the sky becomes filled with high arcing clouds, thin cirrus with a pattern... curved and it begins moving in. Thicker bands move past the high delicate cirrus, they are curved and the rest of the sky is dark blue. Time goes by and more and more of the outflow boundary begins to show it's face but only in that part of the sky. A few wispy clouds go in different directions but like wafts of smoke escaping a fire.

You look on the Sat and you can see on the computer what you are watching out your window. You take a walk, feel the early morning cool temps and watch a few small yellow leaves fall to the ground, the sun climbs higher..the clouds begin to move towards the part of the sky over where you are standing. It's a magnificent ballet provided by Mother Nature.

On Sat:


From below:



Later:



Remember to get those first pics I had to go up to the main street on a hill to get a clear shot. The shot below I took from the deck pointed straight over my head while sipping my morning coffee:



Drank my Baby's Coffee out of my Baby's Coffee Mug and ate breakfast on the deck and kept peeking up overhead and watched as the sky turned milky white briefly... before it became blue again and then another band...

I went to Wilmington last week on purpose, wanted to get a real feel for how it looks and feels vs just Wrightsville Beach which I usually do. Waves were not that big but strong and a stronger undertow. Drove up and down the various beach cities to see clearly what it looks like again, because I felt Earl would get closer than they were saying last weekend. I was right. I said he would get to 75 and he is about there now, hopefully he will stay off shore... suppose this weekend would be a good time to go and look for some shells but probably won't, got things to do with the Jewish Holidays coming up... will see.

Either way enjoy the pics.

As for the track...he is on track and on schedule with a possibility of a delayed front and a faster speed forward and he is a strong, strong, strong, strong storm.

A note here to say how good the TWC coverage has been. I cannot say enough what a fantastic team they have and listening to Brian Norcross and Rick Knabb carefully explain and show their thoughts. The discussion out of the NHC has not been as good as it usually is and for that I am very saddened. The NHC has been doing nothing more than composing long, boring discussions designed to cover their ass and forecast track. They go on and on about this model and that when they could just as easily say the model to the farthest on the left (west) is _____ and the model on the right (east) is _____ and we are drawing the cone between the two. Very little real discussion like you saw five years ago, now it is basically explaining what the models show and defending how they have basically just let the models draw the track. Am telling you if they had a program that wrote discussion based on model output they would use it. And, the other thing they do is explain why they are NOT using obvious data from the dropsonde or the flight... which they have to do because Recon data is now online available to everyone who can figure out how to surf the web. It takes a lot of words to explain, yes they got a higher reading from the dropsonde but it fell "funny" and even though the pressure dropped and we know that we didn't got a good reading to support upping it to a Cat 5 and well it won't be a Cat 5 long anyway and well... very, disappointing discussion. Understand I used to sit up waiting for the discussion, couldn't wait to read what they had to say about the STORM... now it's almost as automatic as the sound of the dyseptic weather radio which is a computerized voice. You see they take the old discussion and they try to keep it as consistent as possible, which is why it begins to sound repetitious and boring but they are trying to show at the end of the day how they were right. It's not about showing they were right, it's about staying on top of the storm and advising us of possibilities. There is a term in online weather called "wishcasting" and the NHC has become the biggest wishcaster of them all.

Saturday Morning's Discussion...five days ago showed this:

120HR VT 02/0600Z 29.5N 69.5W 100 KT

They were basically off by FIVE DEGREES.

Earl kissing 75....where I said he would be... five degrees west of where the NHC said he would be.



I have watched old time mets take a storm without ANY models and "hand prog" a storm by moving weather boundaries, fronts, highs, lows and come in closer than that without using models. I am sure a few people at the NHC would have ventured to say he would be at 74 on Thursday, but they had to correlate it with model output and well...

I just miss good discussion, which is why I am online and talking to people and reading thoughts on various message boards, reading emails from friends ...some professional mets and some not and enjoying that as I am watching local coverage of a hurricane safely away from destroying my house and going without electric for a week. Mind you it's one thing to chase, one thing for the storm to chase you. Sort of like being stalked... always more fun being the stalker than the stalkee...isn't it???

Would love to see one or two brief squalls of pop up showers caught in distant bands or feel some air moving round here.

Rick Knabb is about as good as it gets these days and enjoying his coverage.

As for Fiona...what can I say? My son is going to be an unhappy camper. Maybe he will get lucky and get some tropical action next month up here. As for me, trying to figure out where to be and when to be so as to enjoy the benefits of both worlds.

Gaston will have to wait for another day as will Hermine. I kind of like the name Hermine, she was a great grandmother to my kids....Frank family, German...very German, funny, sweet lady prone to telling jokes and flirting way up into her 70s. Just my sort of gal. One of the best things I ever got from my ex besides our kids were his grandparents Omi and Opa. I look at my kids and see bits and pieces of those two incredible people and smile.

So.... will be around waiting for that turn as Earl approaches the weakness in the ridge and begins to feel the effects of the Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Besos Bobbi

http://www.babyscoffee.com/
http://www.weather.com/tv/personalities/RickKnabb.html