Delta Shifts West

Hurricane Delta has been traveling over the Gulf of Mexico today towards the northwest. As you can see from the visible satellite image this afternoon, she had redeveloped a clear eye wall. This afternoon, she was a Category 2 storm with 105 mile an hour winds. But we are still expecting her to strengthen back up to a Major Hurricane later today.

Unfortunately, the latest track from the National Hurricane Center is a little further west than yesterday. I say “unfortunately” because that means this storm is more likely now to travel over some of the exact same areas that were devastated by Hurricane Laura earlier this season. Some people in southwestern Louisiana just got their power back on last week, and are now looking at another storm heading their way.

I’m still leaning on landfall being southeast of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and heading towards Lafayette from there. That would put Lake Charles on the cleaner side of the storm, but if it comes in too close, it won’t make much of a difference. The model above is the WRF. Both the GFS and the NAM come in further west and are really bad scenarios for the Lake Charles area.

All of the models do agree that landfall is going to be on Friday afternoon/evening. They all also show a pretty quick decrease in power after landfall, so this storm should not remain as strong as far north as Laura did.

Other threats include the risk for flash flooding along a diagonal from southwest Louisiana up into Northeast Louisiana. We will also be on the lookout for quick spin up tornadoes in the outer rainbands from central Louisiana perhaps as far east as Alabama.