We Interrupt Your Week

My coming week has been derailed and interrupted by the typical major disruption this time of year, a hurricane should pass by Tuesday evening.  Which means I need to prepare for some work that will probably need to be done. 

The storm, if you haven't been watching weather for outside your local area, is currently Tropical Storm Idalia (someone said that's pronounced ee-DAL-ya) which has been developing slowly around the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.  The "big picture" of high and low pressure systems that steer these things has finally changed, as the long range models have been saying it would, and after days in one small area, moving around at 2 or 3 mph, it looks like it's going to scoot north and northeast.  

The most recent update to the National Hurricane Center prediction shows the currently predicted path is this:

The center of the storm looks to be coming ashore early Wednesday morning in an area of Florida usually called The Big Bend.  Notice (in the middle column at the bottom of the map, marked "Current Information") that it's currently moving 3 mph.  Compare the distances between the first and second locator dots, labeled 7 PM Sun and 1 PM Mon, and the two dots marked 1 PM Tue and 1 AM Wed.  The first interval, much shorter distance, is 18 hours.  The second two are 12 hours apart.  It is going to speed up quite a bit.

There are a couple of small towns or cities around where that track crosses the shore, and the closest seems to be Steinhatchee. 

I live south of Cape Canaveral, the bump on the east coast about halfway up.  That track is nowhere near me.  So what's the big deal?  

The first thing is that in my reading about this storm, I ran into a meteorologist saying yesterday that the forecast is low confidence because a regular pass of a satellite that can measure wind speed had not happened on Saturday and the hurricane hunter planes that fly through the storms taking data were out east flying through hurricane Franklin.  The satellite pass and a dedicated hurricane hunter mission were supposed to happen today, but the major computer models are run only a few times per day and it might look different on Monday.  

Then there's this forecast, the probability of tropical-storm-force winds for a given area.  It shows about a 25% chance (the light green color is 20-30%) of us getting TS winds.  Another chart on the data site says the arrival time is predicted to be Tuesday in the late afternoon to evening.  The other, much bigger contour map of tropical storm winds to the east of Florida is hurricane Franklin.

Last September, hurricane Ian blasted the southwest coast of Florida and knowing we weren't going to get the full hurricane, just tropical storm winds, I underplayed the serious potential of the tropical storm.  I was stupid and as a result spent from the end of September until late May fixing my ham radio tower installation.  There were some interruptions, like not being to work on it for six weeks due to my stomach surgery, so it's not like I was working on it every day, whatever, I just have no desire to go through that again.

At this point, it looks like I'll get a closer look at things tomorrow.  If the big picture doesn't get any better, I expect to take down the tower and antennas on Tuesday.  If the situation improves, perhaps I don't do that; if the situation degrades, that work may move to Monday.