[nwctwx]

Care to make a long range tracking forecast? Wondering if it'll threaten land before it recurves.

As I said in post #75, it's probably a little too early to get very worked up about it. Historic odds of this affecting the U.S. in any meaningful way are somewhat low.

That said, if I had to make an early call (which I shouldn't after Ernesto), I would say there is a pretty good shot that this will at the very least threaten to strike the U.S. coast.

If indeed it does threaten the coast, it is likely to be a big story maker. Conditions are going to be rather favorable this go around for a decent size storm.

Some of my early favorite "large storm" comparisons are Hugo, Floyd, and Isabel. They all traveled in a similar area early on, and all occurred during somewhat similar weather patterns (strong high to the north, weakeness in the ridge in the SE). Andrew could also possibly be used as a comparison, but I don't believe this will be a similar storm based on this season's trends.

[onthedancefloort]

Thanks for posting those and very sound reasoning!

It tooks look freakishly like Isabel, No?

-t

[AFPhys]

This is pretty weird:

The NHC is apparently not giving the same credence to the SHIPS intensity modelling that they gave TC'Ernie. (Unless I'm really interpreting this wrong - I'm pretty sure SHIPS is SHF5 here):

http://euler.atmos.colostate.edu/~vigh/guidance/atlantic/intensity1.png
(Note: these images change every few hours... the run I'm trying to show is 0000Z on 4Sep.)

SHIPS was the ONLY model that had Ernie going into Cat.3 for any period of time, and many of the others barely touched hurricane. Here, SHIPS doesn't even get TC Flo out of the TS level...

I wonder why the NHC is saying "hurricane" now?

But the track predictions are showing pretty solidly tracking during the next four days from here (40W 15N) to 58W 22N.
http://euler.atmos.colostate.edu/~vigh/guidance/atlantic/early1.png