August 26, 2023
The NHC began advisories on Tropical Depression 10 at 4 p.m. CDT today. The forecast cone is below and you can see that the center of the cone has the storm making landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida as a category 1 hurricane late Tuesday or early Wednesday. The storm is expected to be almost stationary for the next day or so and to slowly strengthen before moving north and then northeast while continuing to strengthen.
As a reminder, the forecast cone represents the possible location of the eye and is based on 2/3rd's of the historical forecast track errors falling within the cone. In other words, "the entire track of the tropical cyclone can be expected to remain within the cone roughly 60-70% of the time (source)." It is noteworthy that the cone does not represent the forecast uncertainty for any particular storm. In this particular situation I am not expecting a landfall outside of the cone, but since this is the first storm of the season I wanted to let you know that this is always possible.
Below are a couple of different ways of looking at the models for this storm. The first is a density plot of four different ensemble suites. Depending on what models are available when this is made it could represent over 100 different ensemble members. It provides a good idea of how much uncertainty there may be. This particular graphic is from this morning's runs which have since shifted a little to the east but the spread is still pretty wide nonetheless. I think there is a medium amount of confidence that a landfall somewhere near the Big Bend area is the right solution but I don't think we'll know for sure for a few more days. You can find these plots here.
This second graphic is the spaghetti models from around noon today, I'm sure you've all seen these before. They are a group of (mostly) track only models and you can see they are favoring the eastern to central Panhandle as well.
Finally, here is a plot showing the model intensity forecasts. The official forecast is calling for a category 1 storm but you can see there is quite a bit of spread in the solutions below. At this point in time the two green solutions above a cat 3 are outliers, but I think we need to pay attention to the cat 2 solutions as a real possibility. When I was first looking at this storm a few days ago it looked like there could be some wind shear or dry air present that could impede intensification. That doesn't look to be the case anymore so I think it is possible that we could see a storm stronger (just maybe quite a bit stronger) than what the official forecast is showing.
That's all I have for today. I'll keep you updated on major changes the best that I can, but the official forecast from the NHC along with local meteorologists are your best source of up to date info. Let me know if you need some links, etc. Tropical Tidbits on Youtube is always a great resource and I would expect to see a new video from him today or maybe tomorrow. Depending on what changes we see tomorrow I might wait until Monday for my next update.
People in the Panama City area definitely need to pay attention and start thinking about making preparations. If it comes your way there will not be much time, especially if it is a strong storm. Those of us a bit more to the west need to keep an eye on it and be prepared to take action. I think people in the Pensacola area are likely safe but don't let your guard down just yet.
Have a good rest of the weekend.
Chris
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