Hurricane Bill
Of all the names the forecasters had to choose from, and BILL fits the bill? At least BILL is now a full blown hurricane while Ana has been dismissed and Claudette just brought some much needed rain to the Florida Panhandle. It's now you show BILL. You are all alone on the hurricane watch for this week.
The National Hurricane Center expected Bill to strengthen over the next 48 hours. Various weather models showed the storm either missing or grazing the west side of Bermuda as it heads toward the U.S. East Coast, CNN meteorologists said Tuesday.
The models showed Bill's path moving dangerously close to the Carolina coast and the Northeast, with the best scenario showing the storm turning back to sea before reaching the United States. What was once believed to be a lower tracking model that could have brought the storm into southern Florida and possibly into the Gulf of Mexico, is now very remote. But, hey, Bill is a hurricane and they still have a mind of their own with a lot of unpredictability.
Bill is the first hurricane of the 2009 Atlantic season.
About 5 a.m. Tuesday, Bill was heading west-northwest near 17 mph and was predicted to follow that path for the next two days. The storm was centered about 810 miles east of the Leeward Islands, a chain located where the Caribbean meets the western Atlantic. Hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 30 miles from the center, and tropical storm-force winds extended outward up to 150 miles.
With sustained winds of near 100 mph, and higher gusts, Bill was a Category 2 storm in the classification system used by the hurricane center. It will become a major hurricane if its sustained winds top 111 mph. So far it's been a very quiet hurricane season. Let's hope that we can keep it that way.
As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com
