Non-political 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Megathread

[BudgieForce]

I expected something like this to happen in Miami or New Orleans, but never Houston.

[BudgieForce]

Looking at the forecasts on Irma's route, nobody is really sure where its going. All we can do is be calm and prepared.

[BudgieForce]

Hurricane watches for Irma are now posted for the northern Leeward Islands.  It's still too early to tell whether the U.S. will be affected, but the forecasting models have been progressively moving further west.  This does increase the likelihood of a U.S. landfall, although it's still quite possible that the storm could recurve to the northeast and miss the U.S. entirely.

Some good resources:

National Hurricane Center - http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Weather Underground "Category 6" blog - https://www.wunderground.com/cat6.  Their last Irma post was https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/hurricane-irma-track-towards-lesser-antilles, but this was from yesterday morning.  A new post should be up later tonight.

Note: take the comments on Cat6 with a grain of salt.  They tend to overreact to every twitch in a model or report, much like daily tracking poll fluctuations around here.

The various projections for Irma's path resonate badly with this article about Tampa's unpreparedness: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/health/environment/tampa-bay-climate-change/

This is a disaster of epic proportion waiting to happen. Has the US ever been hit by two major hurricanes in the span of a single month before?

That type of rhetoric is unnecessary.

[BudgieForce]

I think climate change reduced the amount of hurricanes?

[BudgieForce]

I'm lucky to be in New Jersey right now but I'm kicking myself for not buying flood insurance on my Fort Lauderdale condo when I had the chance.

[BudgieForce]

Watching Maria, it looks like it could pull an Irma here in Florida and not taking anymore chances after the damages we got from it.

We can't say for sure Maria's trajectory but it's pretty apparent it will be weaker than Irma.