Was going to let this pass

Tropical Weather : Weather Underground I was going to totally let this pass without comment, even though Fay should never have been named until she actually became a hurricane, even though reading the discussions the Hurricane center is putting out clearly shows that they are ignoring some computer models and tweaking data to meet their goals, honestly I was going to ignore it all ... just let it slide.

But I ran into this chart of probable wind speeds:

This chart was posted 18 Aug at 1500 UTC (figure you own times) ... it clearly shows that it is unlikely that Fay will become a hurricane for any extended period of time -- it might reach winds of hurricane speed for a couple of hours but nothing that should actually call it an actual hurricane.

Although I will give them credit in that, it won't be the wind that's the issue with this storm -- it will be the rain that will come with it. The storm is likely to hit on the gulf side of the state where they are not used to getting many storms.

My brother lived there for 15yrs and never got hit with anything but the thinner rain bands - and since FL is right at sea level or so they can't take much rain before they begin to flood out.

but still - they have got to start getting their act together or else people are going to start ignoring them. Or maybe they will just 'reconfigure' what hurricane levels are, the way they did the F scale for tornados, so that they can claim that the storms are worse than they are ... the F scale has slowed down the speeds needed for each level -- which means we are now more likely to see an 'F5' tornado than before so they can claim that its because of global warming, not because of any real change: