"The New Orleans radar still shows it bearing down right on top of the city. Some of the heavier bands nearer the center of the storm are starting to enter the city. Conditions south of the city look very bad
already, and getting much worse rapidly."
Using radar to plot the course is risky. The loops are too short to capture much more than one or part of one wobble.
I transfer the coordinates given by the Forecast Discussions and Vortex data to a mapping program and extrapolate at very high resolution.
Still, with the forecast curve to the north, straightline approximations are all but useless this far out, so I've been plotting the +12 and +24 hour computer model positions too.
Right now they say the eye passes some 25 miles east of the center of downtown New Orleans, while the straightline approximations show it passing less than or equal to the same distance west of downtown.
If you understand the ramifications of the geometry of whatever strike we get out of this, you see that the ambivalence makes what I'm doing worthless for predictive purposes, but it does help us keeop track of trends over time.
I've been following the radar for the last few hours, to try to account for the wobbles. Overall, I have seen very little deviation from the due north path it's currently following, and that path would pretty much split the difference between your straightline and modeled approximations. But I'm just a dumb engineer and I don't do storm tracking for a living. :)
What does your trend analysis tell you?