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The 00Z GFS appears to keep Ivan off the east Florida coast and the US really doesn't take a direct hit at all. I haven't really looked at the other models, but lets hope this is the case, because the keys wouldn't survive a direct hit from a 140 knot storm
Hurricane hunter plane reported early today winds over 200 mph about 350ft above the surface and ivan's pressure dropped over 25mb in 12hrs to 916 around dawn this morning. This makes ivan one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the tropical Atlantic...
It also seems that NHC is going back to a west coast landfall on florida, not looking good.
Thanks for setting this up Billy. It's nice to keep in touch with alumni and discuss weather and such. Indeed the forecast track for Ivan looks similar to Charley, which is quite unfortunate. Most people probably heard stories about Florida residents being asked to haul debris piles from Charley into their garages before fleeing Frances. Who knows what they'll do now with such little time to recover from Frances before fleeing from Ivan.
I heard that a prison was destroyed on Grenada and all of the inmates escaped. The west coast of Florida better get down...we'll see how much of an effect Cuba has on strength though.
On a side note...anyone catch the flood statements for Erie and Crawford co. ,PA last night and this morning?...some town was evacuated because officials thought a dam might fail.
Side note number 2...I hear that the new building back at VU is going to be done in 2 or 3 weeks and the furniture comes shortly after that...if it turns out anything like the library did it should be pretty impressive.
I was reading an article on the damage Ivan's done so far and Grenada is pretty much totalled. Ninety percent of people's homes are gone and the prison was destroyed. One of the priorities of the Grenada government is recapturing them all. There was also a report that some of the weaponry from an army office or base were stolen after the officers abandoned it temporarily. Here's hoping it wasn't the convicts that stole those weapons.
Hey everyone...This is a pretty cool site that we were looking at during map discussion today. It shows each of the different model tracks for Ivan and quite a few other things.
http://www.crownweather.com/tropical.html
I see from an intermediate update that hurricane hunters have measured a 914 mb pressure which equates to 165 mph. I wounder when the last hurricane in the Atlantic was this strong. Was it Mitch?
Actually the last hurricane to be this strong was last year with Isabel but it down graded pretty quick before it got to any sort of landfall. (And it was out off the East coast and not near the Gulf of Mexico) I do believe that Mitch is the last Cat 5 to make landfall somewhere in central/North America
Ivan appeared to go through another cycle today as the eye disappeared in the early morning but then rebounded quickly this afternoon with significant intensification.
The path that Ivan has been taking is interesting. The NHC has been predicting it to recurve into the westerlies yet it has continued its eastward track further into the caribbean, sparing people in Jamaica, Grand Caymen and Cuba. However, this could be problematic for the coastal regions of the U.S. such as Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama as it may come into those areas without having gone over a significant land mass. It will be interesting to see what the hurricane does over the next day and what track it does in fact take.
One of the grad students here at OU did his master's work on hurricanes and hurricane climatology. He developed a really nice way in which to represent all hurricane and tropical storm climatologies. So if you are wondering what storms have done in the past visit his site at
