Angie's Wife, the air quality is poor. Last couple days haven't brought much wind to move things around. Pollutants build up and don't go anywhere. We're not talking about the highly-publicized 'carbon,' but pollutants that we actually choke & gag on. Those have fallen out of the spotlight since carbon rose to fame, but they haven't stopped being a problem. Days like today, people with asthma will notice them.
The hurricane will help with that -- big time. Think of it as a giant exhaust fan and water hose combined. The air will be a lot cleaner after it passes.
R2B, I also have been watching the fluctuations in the models. I think it illustrates the fact that we as forecasters stray toward relying on them too much, and the general public (in turn) strays toward holding weather forecasts to 100% precision.
The main thing anyone should get out of any storm forecast is that there's a storm headed in our general direction. We need to be happy with that amount of warning, because it's all we have in 2010. It wasn't very long ago (just decades) that hurricanes at sea remained invisible to us until they were reported by ships. Same with all other weather. All this fancy technology has only been around since the 1960s when this lake first started becoming a popular place to build houses.
Prior to this current era, it was possible for hurricanes to sneak up on only 24-48 hours' notice. And now, just decades later, we fuss over the exact tracks of storms, several days in advance. A forecast (including my forecast) will always be based on an exact track, because it has to be based on something. It makes the most sense to base a forecast on the most likely scenario.
Just remember the weather doesn't follow the probabilities we assign to it; We base our probabilities on past weather. Although the weather repeats itself a lot, it's always doing something new somewhere, sometime, so weather forecasts will always have a margin of error. Always.
I'm sticking with a "nor'easter" evolution for this storm because the storm is expected to stay south & east of the lake. That means the wind will follow the same directions and patterns in the same order as with a nor'easter. Wind speed and precipitation intensity will be the variables depending on how close the track is.
We had some powerful nor'easters earlier this year, and the first part of this summer had a lot of thunderstorms. They always leave "unfinished work" in the trees. Every now and then throughout the summer, one of those weaker trees/limbs has just fallen on its own (or with the help of ants) --sometimes onto power lines. Sunny day power outages get annoying after a while, and it's not safe to passers-by who aren't anticipating a sudden falling tree. It usually takes a good storm like this (could be) in order to clean out the weaker/damaged trees.
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