Thursday Irene: eastern NC will get hit

Time to get ready for a significant impact to the eastern part of the state as we go through the next few days. Irene continues to be a very large category 3 with hurricane winds extending up to 70 miles away from the center and tropical storm force winds 255 miles out from the center. This will probably be a category 4 storm at some point today before weakening a bit as it gets farther to the north. Here is the latest run of forecast models.

The eastward shift that we saw for several days earlier in the week has pretty much come to an end. The models have been fairly consistent over the past few runs which means I am fairly confident we can start to talk about the forecast path at this point. You can see they are still skirting the outer banks, but I do think we will see at least a brief landfall over the barrier islands before this storm continues north into New England.




A hurricane watch is now in effect for the coast north of Surf City, NC to the NC/Virginia border. A tropical storm watch is in effect for north of Edisto Beach, SC to Surf City, NC. Again whether or not we see an actual landfall in the state, the conditions will be basically the same.


Let me put the new GFS model run on from this morning. . .

This is for around 6 PM Saturday evening. It shows a tremendous amount of wind and rain in the eastern part of the state and along the coast. Storm surge will be an issue with this sytem and especially coastal erosion. We will start to see deteriorating conditions through the day on Saturday. The storm is forecasted to be weaker at this point but could still do a lot of damage. Anybody with interests in the eastern half of the state needs to make plans now to protect property.



As usual I'll come back later this morning with the new hurricane center forecast of Irene.