Yeah the 10 o'clock update doesn't look good. They're really expecting this thing to pick up speed over the weekend. We're checking the supplies tonight and preparing for the rest of the week. Safe to say the annual Extended Family Labor Day trip is out for the weekend. Hooray for boarding up and bending over! People in the office have spent the past few days mocking Fay. I keep trying to tell them it's bad karma to do that stuff, but they won't listen.

(Not that it has any true bearing on where this storm is headed, but still)

On a side note, if this thing hits NOLA, how much coverage will get juxtaposed with the RNC?

Whoa. Stay safe, guys.

The question is, which is more deadly, the hurricane, or the crocodile
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_(crocodile)[/url]

Have no fear New Orleans folks for it will surely hit Houston dead on! How do I know? Because it will make land fall DIRECTLY before I purchase my house and it will reduced to a mud puddle with little hardwood sticks and granite counter top chunks.

Looks like we get to sit on the sidelines for this one. Good luck and stay safe.

This was passed on by a colleague who is a client of the Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile

I like to go right to the National Hurricane Center's website for info.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Their graphics aren't the flashiest, but all of the info is straight from the horse's mouth. The only thing they're missing that I'd like to see is an overlay of the forecast tracks from the different models.

For satellite images, I like the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/

I used to have a script that would pull the latest GOES east satellite image and update it as my background every 15 minutes.

Listening to Gov. Jindal on WWL.com

Edit: Whoops. That was supposed to go to Twitter. LOL@myself.

Hey, interesting stuff Buzz. I suspect they're more correct than me by far. I was just tossing my amateur opinion out there.

I do hope the storm weakens as it hits the northern Gulf waters.

Gustav took a jog south overnight, and will now pass south of Jamaica. This puts it on a more westerly course. The latest forecast also shows the storm spending more time in the gulf and strengthening to a Cat 3 before landfall. Landfall is now showing Tuesday morning somewhere along the LA Gulf Coast, west of the Atchafalaya Basin.

That just means that it's lining up on NOLA. He'll turn back east. They always hook east.

And if it doesn't, a major storm in the Atchafalaya is actually much worse, from a storm surge perspective, for the "west" (south) side of the river. You know, the side that actually stayed mostly dry last time. (Also, the side where my mom lives in the home I grew up in.)

Edit: I know I said they always hook but just to make sure I don't spread misinformation, Texas isn't out of the realm of possibility.

Note: This graphic will probably auto-update so it may no longer be relevant if you're looking at it long after I posted.

The archive link I posted was for Ivan.

The Gustav archive shows, IMHO, that Gustav has been tracking roughly as they expect.

Of course this (south of Cuba) is about the place on the map where Ivan got all unpredictable, too.

The mad rush for supplies has already started in Lafayette. I went to the grocery last night to get a few non perishables and every basket was filled with water and batteries. Lines at the pump are also heavier than usual. My current thinking is if our local impact is at Rita levels or below, we stay, otherwise, meep meep zip tang!

Yeah, looking this morning the track seems a bit more westward overall, but honestly, until the storm gets into the Gulf it'll be hard to say. The more time it spends over land if it crosses Cuba, the more difficult it'll be to predict what track it'll take until it gets into the Gulf.

Here's to hoping for a freak dissipation over Cuba that results in no hurricane hitting the Gulf coast! They really don't need more storms anywhere along that coastline anytime soon after the last four years.