Hurricane Update - Wilma

Well NOAA-NHC is reporting Hurricane Wilma is upto 110mph winds as of 11PM EDT October 18, which puts it at the top of Category 2. This means tomorrow the storm should be at least a Category 3 storm. The guessing game has already started on potential landfall sites with NOAA-NHC's five-day forecast predicting an almost right angle turn east to strike at southern Florida sometime around 8PM Saturday night.

This course is predicted upon five high-pressure systems stretching from Texas, along the Central Gulf Coast, and Florida forcing Wilma to stream eastward along the pressure gradient and following a low pressure storm front that has already gone into the Atlantic. So if anything happens to cause any of those high-pressure systems to move or collapse, there could be a radical re-assessment of possible landfall. So everyone on the Gulf Coast better be prepared to move just in case, so drag out the checklists again while paying attention to the weather wonks.

Update on last night's post: I am still trying to track down when the 1969 hurricane season was changed, but I am closer to figuring it out. It looks like the season was re-evaluated, but by whom I do not know yet. It maybe a combination of an article by Neuman in 1999 that was updated by Chris Landsea to produce the following Table8a which can be found in The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Tropical Cyclones From 1851 to 2004 put out by NOAA and updated in 2005. I am still looking around, but to meet this new number, then two of the three tropical storms had to be upgraded: Anna[which fell victim to another storm system and did not strengthen with max winds only measured at 60 knots on several occasions], Eve [max winds of 50 knots before being killed by invading cold air], or Jenny [which had measured max winds of only 35 knots in its erratic life]. Or there were storm systems that were missed back in 1970, though in the case of Jenny a cut-off Low that produced Jenny also produced two low pressure systems that did not develop prior to Jenny is mentioned in the 1970 report.