Well now what is left of Frances is supposed to strike to the west of Richmond, Virginia, after devastating practically the entire state of Florida. Here's the situation now. There is another storm, Ivan, which is about to cross the Leeward Islands and has made a mess out of Grenada. The models all seem to say that the storm will turn to the north and head towards southern Florida. Not again. Only one model goes beyond this, the GFS, and that one says that the hurricane will follow a trough out into the Atlantic, then when a high goes out past it, it suddenly makes a left turn and plows into, well, at 00Z and 12Z into North Carolina, at 06Z into Nova Scotia, and at 18Z into extreme southeastern Virginia. So this is one to keep a watch of, to see if it will actually do this.
In the meantime I picked up these interesting tidbits about hurricanes from the various message boards and other places:
Ivan is going the wrong way. Russia is east.
Can we just put yellow caution tape along the entire state of Florida?
Hey, when Ivan makes that left turn out in the Atlantic into Virginia or North Carolina, it should put on its turn signal.
There goes the Florida economy for two years.
The Florida State Seminoles at Miami Hurricanes football team got postponed because of a hurricane. That's like a Tampa Bay game being postponed because of raids by buccaneers, a Green Bay game being postponed because the city sent them packing, or a Dallas game being postponed because a bunch of cowboys with their cattle ran onto the field dropping plops. I don't think Frances had any interest in joining the Miami football team.
The funniest of all that I met was when someone reported that NOAA had spotted an area of disturbed weather, a large wave, between the Azores and the Leeward islands, and that there is a chance of this developing into a tropical system. The first reaction of readers to this was "FISH!!!". And then someone displayed a cartoon of a boat with a fisherman on it, reeling in a fish over and over again. The idea of throwing the epithet "FISH" at tropical weather strikes me as being really funny. Of course it is short for "fishspinner", which means a storm that stays out at sea and does little more than spin fish around in circles.
Nevertheless, after experiencing Isabel last year, I never want to encounter any of these storms again.
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