[niss]

I always thought about doing an "ask me about the weather" thread, as my undergrad degree is in meteorology, but since I never did anything with it other than go to law school, and since college was 20 years ago, I'd probably just embarrass myself.

That background is intended to explain why I subscribe to various weather services and that I have a slight inkling of what I am talking about (but not much).

Anyway, one of the services to which I subscribe -- who is ridiculously accurate about this kind of thing -- is calling for the storm of the GA coast right now to develop into a hurricane, hit around Hatteras by Sunday morning, and track up the east coast to off Long Island. While this service has been talking about this possibility for a while, the models apparently are picking it up now. The European has a pretty significant storm centered off South Jersey on Monday morning, but it brings the thing inland somewhat which could knock the wind down. GFS has the storm far enough offshore to be a miss, but there is a trough heading into the NE at that time and it seems hard to believe that the storm wouldn't hook up with the trough and ride closer to the coast. The Canadian looks like a pretty strong storm (966 mb) hitting NC and then brings the storm right up the coast, but weakens it enough so that it is 987mb when it gets to where it would affect NJ and NY. When it gets over south Jersey it's at 989 with apparently a decent gradient, indicating decent wind speeds still.

The service says that expectations are for a Cat. 2/3 hit but Cat. 4 cannot be ruled out yet. And the models are indicating that this storm could maintain substantial strength all the way to the mouth of the Delaware.

Various hurricane experts have been saying that the cities are overdue for a hit. While this is not a catastrophic forecast by any means, it sounds like up to NYC a storm of tropical storm strength to potentially minimal hurricane strength is possible.

Perhaps someone who's more up on this these days can add to this.