Here We Go Again!

Last night, I wasn't worried about Tropical Storm Wilma's path, but today is a different story. The original forecast track showed the storm hitting the coastline of Belize (and fading away there), but today's forecast shows the storm clipping the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula instead, making an abrupt 90-degree change in course, and crashing into the southwestern Florida coast, somewhere along the Naples - Fort Myers - Punta Gorda coastline, around sunset Saturday October 22nd. The model guidance is still not very good yet, this far out, but I'm worried that both NOGAPS and GFS models are telling essentially the same story, and this Florida landfall location is uncomfortably close to Tampa.

If this works out as forecast, one helpful feature is that the winds in the Tampa area would be principally from the east, and thus there wouldn't be a storm surge along the coast, and flooding would occur entirely from rainfall.

Keep an eye out (and I'll keep an eye out): this storm could easily make a run for Tampa instead!