Friday morning Gustav update

Meteorologist Bob Van Dillen

All right, the 5 am numbers are coming out and Gustav is still a tropical storm. It’s been lashing Jamaica for the last day and is still hugging their southwest coast this morning. That means tons of rain for the island, maybe as much as 25 inches, and the possibility of mudslides.

Bob Van Dillen forecasts that Tropical Storm Gustav will continue to gather strength.

So where does this thing go from here? The steering current for the last 36 hours has been a high-pressure center over Florida, but that will weaken and move East, allowing the Bermuda high to strengthen and build westward. That would steer Gustav on a northwesterly track, over the Cayman Islands today, reaching the Western tip of Cuba by Sunday. From there, it should keeps its track towards the northern Gulf Coast, making landfall there sometime on Tuesday morning.

The latest computer model tracks actually shift it to the east, so anywhere from the western panhandle of Florida to eastern Texas is in Gustav's range. A few models try to develop an upper level low-pressure area over the southeastern US on Sunday, and that would draw the storm a little east of New Orleans. Stay tuned on that, it’s still up in the air as to the exact track.

The storm's strength still looks to be scary. It runs over hot water and little shear, and may become a category four for a brief period of time in the Gulf of Mexico. The official National Hurricane Center’s forecast maxes the wind out at 125 mph sustained, a strong category 3.

Oh yeah, Tropical Storm Hannah is still out there in the Atlantic north of the Leeward Islands, but that is just too much for my egghead to process right now. It’s a week out from anybody, and may fizzle apart.