Hurricane Dennis Approaches United States
Hurricane Dennis is preparing to exit Cuba and continue traveling north towards a rendezvous with the Gulf coast sometime Sunday afternoon. He remains a powerful storm, with winds up to 150 MPH, and is expected to strengthen again while over the warm Gulf waters.
Computer models are predicting Dennis will make landfall somewhere near the Alabama-Florida border, and then move northwest through Alabama and Mississippi, before moving towards the northeast. The erratic pattern (think of it as an upside down, tilted L) is due to the presence of a high pressure system over the Southeast that keeps Dennis from moving East. The effects of the high weaken as the storm moves farther North, and eventually lets Dennis follow the path it wants to.
The real question is how far north the storm will have to go before it moves east. Some computer models have the storm moving east at the Alabama Tennessee border, others the Tennessee Kentucky border, and still others along the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana.
Exactly how far the high pressure system forces Dennis west, and how far north the storm must go to move east will have a lot of effect on the weather we see in Georgia. Already, the first clouds are forming over southeast Georgia, and we should begin to see the effects of Dennis in metro Atlanta sometime Saturday afternoon. The best guess now is that the worst effects of the storm will be felt in the south and west portions of the metro area, but that the entire region will get some rain. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, and there probably won’t be an exact estimate until sometime tomorrow evening or Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, a low pressure system currently over the western Atlantic could develop into tropical storm Emily sometime late next week. Dennis is already the earliest category 4 hurricane to develop in the Gulf, and the strongest storm to appear so early in the season. It looks like we’re in for a long summer of tropical weather.
Sphere: Related Content