Over the weekend, Hurricane Erin grabbed national headlines by dramatically intensifying from just tropical storm strength to a category five storm with steady winds clocked at 160 mph in 24 hours. Erin maintained peak intensity for about nine hours.
While the media can't resist talking about jumping from 75 mph to 160, the return to minor storm status never gets the same coverage. It was never forecast to be a potential problem for us on the "Space Coast" of Florida, but I'm always happy to wave good-bye to storms.
This is the 00:00 UTC plot for Wednesday, August 20, update from National Hurricane Center in Miami. Entering the latitude and longitude of Erin's center from this plot into a nifty little website that will calculate the distance between any two points by those coordinates, it tells me that as of the 00 hour position, Erin was 487 miles from me. As a category 2 storm, the winds are nowhere near as threatening.
It looks like it might get a bit closer, but our winds are forecast to be under 15 mph tomorrow, maybe gusting to 20, through Thursday night.
That's the forecast for probably 80% of the days in the summer.
While I don't have a formal forecast for Thursday night's launch of the X-37B Space Plane for the US Space Force, by then the storm will be a little behind the "2 AM Fri" point on this plot. Far from the launch corridor.
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