The Coast of Texas

This morning, I heard on the radio that they were evacuating Galveston, TX. Apparently a consensus had developed that Hurricane Rita was heading for the middle coast of TX, arriving by evening time, Friday, and given the chaos surrounding Hurricane Katrina, no one wants to take any chances with another urban area (especially one already known to be very vulnerable, through the actions of the hurricane of 1900, which killed 5000 people there).

Sure enough, the NOGAPS model predictions had changed, in order to finally join the consensus formed yesterday by most of the other models. Yesterday, NOGAPS predictions had been an outlier among the other predictions, showing Rita as hitting Brownsville, TX, and then moving up the Rio Grande Valley into NM. The consensus instead shows Rita moving through eastern and central Texas only, and not making it as far west as NM.

The reason NOGAPS shifted its forecast is apparently because the model decided that the large trough that has developed in the western U.S. will not be quite as deep as originally thought, and will therefore move east a bit faster than originally thought. Usually the accuracy is limited by initialization errors of the temperature and pressure fields, and since radiosonde coverage over the eastern Pacific is skimpy, initialization errors tend to be large, particularly over the western U.S.

In any event, the Freeport/Matagorda Bay/Victoria, TX area is in for a bumpy ride. Galveston probably won't see the worst of it this time, but they may get some flooding.