I wouldn’t want to be in its path. The WaPo has a stunning collection of images.
It’s bashing the Bahamas now, but I think it’s eyeing Florida. Be safe out there!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I just moved from the Panhandle of Florida to Orlando. I moved from a region that was 24 miles from landfall of Hurricane Michael last year and is still recovering from that storm to a city about to be impacted by a storm with a wind speed only 21 mph less than Hurricane Patricia, the most powerful storm to hit the Western hemisphere since the 1970s (prior to this, instrumentation was unable to assess the power of hurricanes with the accuracy we see today, making any comparisons between storms prior to 1970 and today unreliable).
Tony!!!!1! Please your and family and friends and, of course, you, stay safe. And not too wet. Also watch out for flying sharks. (The mildly deranged penguin asks that the cheeses be keep safe, albeit it can be Ok if they get a bit damp. I point out Florida is not, in so far as I am aware, renown for its cheeses, she’s now off consulting the Encyclopædia Cheesy… Oh, and she adds walruses are perhaps a greater risk than sharks…)
I heard it might be hitting the Carolinas. Does that mean we get to say it’s god’s vengeance for them doing voter suppression? Nah, that’d be monstrous.
Marcus Ranum @ 3
Knowing that lot, they probably think of a Category 5 hurricane as their god’s punishment for not suppressing votes enough.
Teh National Hurrican Center (Your tax dollars put to good use) is saying that Dorian will not actually hit Florida, but will ride up the coast lie a buzzsaw, delivering wind and rain along the way.
Oddly, there seems to be a group of Christians Who went out to pray that God redirect Dorian elsewhere, just as they did last year to a hurricane two years ago that hit them anyway. I’m guessing that they’ll claim their prayers prevented damage from exceeding $100 million (actual damage from hurricane Irma: $85 million). However bad the destruction, they’ll claim that their prayers kept things from being even worse. Doncha jest love unfalsifiable assertions?
Bashing Bahamas is maybe to nice, razing it would be more accurate.
This storms forward movement got slowed down a lot and it is only moving with 8 mph, with a suspected drop to 4 mph. While this will weaken the storm in the long run, it will also keep the storm over the Bahamas for up to 15 hours, with some islands getting the full power of this storm. 15 hours of sustained winds up to 185 mph will destroy pretty much everything standing that is not a bunker.
If one is inclined to invoke divine judgment, a far more plausible explanation would be that the hurricane is God’s judgment on the Southeast for continuing to elect climate change deniers to Congress. They are getting what they voted for.
You must be wrong PZ, the President of the United States of America has never heard of a Category 5, so clearly they don’t exist. So I’m guessing Dorian is 4.5, 4.6 tops.
As nomdeplume@9 says, Trump doesn’t think he’s hurricane. Four such storms hit the US since he took office.
And, National Weather Service corrects Trump on Hurricane Dorian: ‘Alabama will not see any impacts’:
I presume hair furor will now fire the current head of the NWS, replacing them with a some sports personality whose total knowledge of hurricanes is the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team, and of weather is baseball games can be delayed by rain. They will, of course, deny global heating, and order all climatic research stopped and records erased.
Reginald Selkirk @ #5
Depends on what you mean by a hit. Some part of that storm will almost certainly hit Florida. Some of it probably already is. There’s still a 50% chance of hurricane force winds along the “Space Coast”, and a much higher risk of tropical storm force winds. Of course, steering predictions can be rough estimates, and this is a big one (200+ miles by my estimate) so being slightly off can have significant repercussions. The latest prediction approach seems to be spaghetti tracks of the path of the eye, and some of those are still showing the eye plowing into Florida.
Even if the eye doesn’t cross the coast into Florida, and even if the storm weakens, there will be lots of water…rain and storm surges, tides held in for days. As the creeks and rivers back up, areas along the coast suddenly become isolated islands. People in those areas don’t often recognize the risk they are in until it’s too late to evacuate. While that might not be a big risk for healthy young people, elderly people may have trouble getting medical services, should they need them. My 90-year-old mother finally got this point a year or so ago when she was cut off in her home in North Jacksonville. Fortunately she didn’t have a medical emergency that time, but she would not have gotten help if she needed it. She’s promised to evacuate the next time.
The Guardian’s report seems realistic.
Since it’s Dorian, what we should have done was paint a picture of it while it was still just a tropical storm. Then the picture would have spun faster and faster, while the actual storm would have just stayed as a little squall.
The predicted track is worriesome, as it would have the eye of the storm following the Gulf Stream, providing energy to the storm for much of the eastern coast.
From the latest jet stream projections, the hurricane should be disrupted by the jet stream around the point it is nearing Virginia.
This is likely to be a very, very expensive week, both in lives and property destruction.
blf @10:
Somehow it makes perfect sense that Trump would keep talking about the storm just to look like he’s doing something, spewing random rhetorical exaggerations and inaccurate details that just might cause unnecessary panic and confusion.
Brainfog. 13 hour drive to Huntsville area the hell away from hell. When UKMET radically shifted from Panhandle toward FL East coast several days ago and trending then went offshore with models I sighed and hoped that would mean something good. NHC official looked good then it inched backward. The intensification and westward trending hit my trigger point and I bailed with dog and what I could pack in car. Safe buffer for me but the area I fled is under the gun. Hope stays offshore. Recent Euro and GFS way too close. Know lots of folks still there. Scared shitless about this one. Lucked out with Matthew which had roughly same trajectory. Can’t sleep.
Not sure how this UKMET run bodes:
http://meteocentre.com/numerical-weather-prediction/map-animation.php?mod=ukmet&run=00&stn=UV10m&map=na&lang=en&mode=latest&yyyy=latest&mm=latest&dd=latest
Dorian will probably disconnect the power where I live sometime tomorrow.
Depending on how over-extended the repair crews get, we’ll probably go electricity-less for a week or longer. (My personal record at this location came to 29 days in the dark after Frances and Jeanne in ’04. A friend then south of Orlando spent nearly seven months in a non-Edisonian lifestyle that year.)
I’ve spent much of the last few days obsessing over weather reports, and trying to imagine the situation in the northern Bahamas. Under a constant wind of 185 mph, how could you even tell gusts reached 225 mph? A nation without roofs…
I was in its path and it came within 100 miles of me. It’s not fun when a monster storm gets so close that every little wobble in its track means something. I had visions of Andrew type destruction. Wondering why I didn’t evacuate because the margin of error in the the forecast put the core right on top of you. The Bahamas got it bad.
Been hawk-eyeing radar and Category 6 blog comments (where tempers have flared and trolls go to die quickly via banhammer) to see what threat Dorian is currently posing for FL East Coast. Mostly squall lines, which can pack a punch, and some sporadic power outages (per FPL map). Saw Reed Timmer was visiting Space Coast from his Twitter feed, which is never a welcome sight. Ever.
Coastline northward toward Carolinas is still under some threat and the devastation left behind in Bahamas is horrific.
And there is some chatter of another potential long tracking CV seed that hasn’t even splashed down from African coast yet. Please no. Enough already.
Dorian hardly made a ripple here in north-central Florida; my power went out for less than an hour.
Coastal Carolinians seem to have it worse than anyone in the Gunshine State; here’s hoping the non-Republicans there escape unscathed.