Looking at the tropics, I waited until this morning to call the “go / no go” for the Hurricane Earl chase. While I would love to go intercept land fall of a major hurricane again since it’s been since Hurricane Gustav in 2008 that I was in the tropical systems, Earl is not going to be the storm to chase.
Reason’s why, the eye or center of Hurricane Earl is now on several computer models forecast to remain way off shore. The area of interests to serious hurricane chasers is the right front quadrant of the hurricane where the most violent winds are. This area will be nowhere near land as it passes by the east coast until it moves up into Canada.
Most major areas of impact in the United States such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the Cape Code area of Massachusetts’s are well removed from the center and the latest forecasts show that the storm passage will be during the overnight hours where you won’t be able to see much of anything. Sure their will be some waves and rain, but it will not be a major system that will do much damage to the area’s the media is hyping up right now.
So with no landfall until the system hits Canada this weekend where it will have weakened significantly by then, I’m sitting this storm out and waiting for the next system, Tropical Depression Nine (TD9) that formed this morning off the coast of Africa.