A natural low

Hawks are truly remarkable creatures, but I'm pretty sure they can't make long-range weather forecast and I have a sneaking suspicion that Hurricane Isabel might screw up their travel plans.

As explained before, hawks pick their weather carefully to begin the big flight south. They pay more attention to the sky than the calendar, but in general some time in the next seven days I would expect them to make their move. True to form there have only been a handful of early birds - about 50-70 - spotted each day from Mt. Wachusetts this week, even though the weather has been good. The huge flight is yet to come.

But tonight the clouds will come in and the forecast is for showers - or mostly cloudy with chance of showers - right through next Thursday. So I imagine they won't come out until that spell of bad weather breaks. And that's the rub. See, we got Isabel, the first Category 5 (that's super nasty) hurricane in the Atlantic in five years. She's chugging westward and really seems to be drawing a bead on the East Coast. I don't usually make such wild predictions. Hurricanes are entirely fickle folks who do what we least expect, but all the indicators the long-range forecasters have seem to point in the general directions of the East Coast. Look at this forecast map.

Of course, where on the East Coast is another thing - but just about anywhere could cause problems for the hawks. So this whole thing is a question of timing.

Isabel may be of concern to something more than the hawks, of course. Will it hit here? Who knows. It's been a while since we had a direct hit. But let me explain two things:

1. Hurricanes - the really dangerous parts - are a lot smaller than they look. You see those satellite photos and they are huge, but really there is a path about 50 miles wide that is the real danger area. So there are plenty of critical spots on the coast that have not taken a direct hit from a hurricane - such as Manhattan or New Orleans.

2. Even if you take a direct hit, the real danger is the dial serge and this is mostly negated if the hurricane happens to come at low tide. In 1944 a really strong hurricane hit southern New England, but you hardly ever hear it mentioned because it came at low tide. Hurricane Carol in 1954 wasn't that strong - but it hit at high tide, as did the 1938 hurricane - and those two are frequently mentioned.

Still, you look at the possible paths and what has happened before . . .





Actually, far better than these maps is the site I took them from - the tropical weather portion of Underground Weather.

There you have several options. you can look at the projected path, "historical" gives you the paths of other storms throughout history that come close to the track of the current storm. And of course there's the latest satellite photo.

And....well, there's much more explore around the main site. It's updated every six hours - sometimes more often. From the main page you can even dial up a specific year, get a list of storms from that year, and learn about each individual storm. In short - a great place for hurricane nuts to go nuts.

So will Isabel pay us a visit? Toss a coin. No don't. It's not a 50/50 chance. Something much, much slimmer. (Keep your eye on the "strike probabilities" part of the site mentioned if and when Isabel gets within three days of us. ) But it's possible. And it is certainly possible that it will cross the path of the migrating broad-wings who have no web access and a 4,000-mile journey ahead of them. They will spend several weeks moving down the coast, over to Texas, across Central America and to points as far south as Peru.

Posted by Greg Stone at September 12, 2003 11:06 AM