Monday, June 07, 2010

Oily Crystal Ball

Today's NOGAPS weather forecasts suggests tropical storms will arrive in the Caribbean south of Haiti in about a week. That would mean maybe nearly two weeks before they start seeing storm activity near the Deepwater Horizon.

Then again, NOGAPS is a 'Chicken Little' kind of tropical forecasting tool: it nucleates hurricanes faster than Tiger Woods changes girl friends. Maybe the Gulf will have good weather for a couple of weeks. Still, at some point, NOGAPS will be right. A storm will approach, the ships will be forced to leave, and that incredibly-leaky Rube Goldberg machine they have down there will dump all the oil into the Gulf with no interruption.

Even though they are capturing some of the crude now, BP is still dumping unconscionable amounts of it. In news coverage, a kind of oil fatigue has set in. People keep trying to move on, but the crude won't let them.

If I had to guess, I'd say most tropical storms will track into the western Gulf of Mexico first. The persistent trough off the east coast of the U.S. has moved the storm track pretty far south, and west.

No comments:

Post a Comment