Riptide's crack meteorological team has just issued this update on Tropical Storm Isaac: 09:17:00 AM EST Due to favorable wind shear and hot ocean temps, by Monday TS Isaac is expected to rage with the devastating power of ten thousand nuclear bombs. It will personally find your house, smash each individual roof tile, rip you off the toilet seat, and then eat each of your children, one by one. Also, it hates you personally and wants you to die.
Our meteorological team, we should mention, sometimes smokes too much pot and gets paranoid. But hey, even NOAA has plopped Miami into the "cone of concern" as of this morning. South Florida could see tropical storm conditions by Sunday.
Isaac is currently sporting winds around 50 mph near the Lesser Antilles, and NOAA issued a tropical storm watch this morning for the British Virgin Islands.
The agency's five day storm-track, meanwhile, now takes Isaac right over the heart of South Florida and projects the storm will reach Category 1 strength by then.
Before you flee to your bunker, though, don't forget that forecasting out by five days is still a very inexact science. Forecasters are confident the storm system will pass over Puerto Rico and then slide by Hispanola, but after that it's anyone's guess.
Dr. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground notes that his best modeling system still thinks Isaac will careen off into a Yucatan path and end up hitting Mexico.
As for the RNC in Tampa on Monday -- yes, there's still a chance the storm could disrupt the GOP party. Here's Masters again:
"I blogged about the climatological chances of a hurricane causing an evacuation of Tampa during the convention in a post last week, putting the odds at 0.2 percent," he writes. "The odds in the current situation are higher, probably near 2 percent. It would take a "perfect storm" sort of conditions to all fall in place to bring TD 9 to the doorstep of Tampa as a hurricane during the convention, but that is one of the possibilities the models have been suggesting could happen."
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