Hurricane Katrina is a little more than 663 miles away from me right now, which is a comfortable distance. The National Weather Service keeps insisting they know which way the storm is going to track and the general vicinity in which it will hit (the northern Gulf of Mexico). But their estimates keep getting moved westward. First, the Florida Panhandle was the likely target. Then Mobile Bay or Biloxi. Now the best guestimates put it somewhere in the central to southeast Louisiana coast. If it keeps moving westward, it will not be a good thing for us on the upper Texas coast.
I don’t find any fault with the weather service. Although it seems that forecasting hurricanes would be easier than predicting winter storms in this part of the country, these tropical badboys and badgirls sometime don’t go exactly as planned. Thus, we will just have to wait and see whether Katrina takes that northward turn that would put it somewhere in Louisiana. Right now there are hurricane watches for the New Orleans areas and tropical storm warnings back east to the Dry Tortugas. That is an odd name isn’t it? It sounds like some kind of ugly intestinal virus.
The photo is of some hurricane taken from the WC-130 aircraft of the Hurricane Hunters out of Keesler AFB, Miss. During the summers when I was stationed down the road in Gulfport, I used to see these big birds slowly make their way out into the Gulf. These folks who fly into the eye of the storms are heroes as far as I am concerned. Heroes and probably a little nuts. But the information they gather helps us have a better clue where these storms are going. Better them than me.