So as fate would have it, I flew to Texas for a business trip to start the week. As I flew over Houston on Monday, I noticed some of the canals still are pretty full of water from Harvey.
I got an alert on my phone Wednesday afternoon as I was heading to the airport to head home, from a TV station from Atlanta, highlighting the potential for tropical impacts here early next week.
Haven't dove into the model data yet -- I've been home for just a couple of hours and been preoccupied with playoff baseball and laundry -- but history says for those of us in North Georgia, a robust tropical system that landfalls in the Florida panhandle/Alabama coast and moves northward spells bad weather up here.
Irma really was an outlier, a system that moves from SE Ga/NE Fla to the northwest. More often, my area gets hammered by systems that come ashore from Biloxi-Pensacola and race northward through Mississippi/Alabama, putting us north and east of the center of circulation.
Even without diving into the potential metrics of this system, those in North Georgia have to watch this. A Cat 1 that landfalls at, say, Mobile Bay and works NNE, would put a good bit of N Georgia into the area where there could be rain and wind impacts.
I really hope this does not develop into a powerful system. Let's watch it and pay attention, and plan accordingly.
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