POSTED AT 10:30 AM CT TUESDAY: In its 10 am update, the National Hurricane Center has modified its forecast track for Hurricane Laura, and has shifted the storm’s landfall slightly closer to the Houston-Galveston metro area. We remain within the cone of uncertainty, and need to be prepared for the possibility of additional westward shifts in the track this afternoon. We are still in line for anything from a glancing blow to direct major hurricane landfall. Bottom line: This is time for preparedness and action, not panic. This is a very serious situation that all residents should be following closely.

Local effects

The location and intensity will play a major role in the effects Houston sees. Even a track movement of 20 or 30 miles can make a big difference in the effects we see (I discussed this in a post earlier today). Due to the uncertainty, for the discussion below we will provide a forecast for Laura’s effects in Houston based on the current National Hurricane Center track, and those for a reasonable worst-case scenario should Laura track further west and make landfall along Galveston Island.

Winds

At this time winds are our greatest concern. They are likely to be strongest near the storm’s center of circulation, and to its immediate east. The most recent run of the HWRF model depicts a probable wind scenario for Laura should the storm make landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border. As you can see, winds over the Houston area would generally remain near or below Tropical Storm intensity, especially west of Interstate 45.

If the storm makes landfall over Galveston Island, the core of strongest winds would go inland along Interstate 45. This would provide widespread residential damage and knock power out for weeks, for many.

Storm Surge

This is our next biggest concern for the metro area. Laura is smaller than Hurricane Ike, and probably will come in east of its landfall location, so a surge along Galveston Island, and along the bay, probably will be less than the region experienced in 2008 under most scenarios. Here is the hurricane center forecast for surge along the current forecast track:

If the storm tracks further west, it looks like a storm surge of 6 to 10 feet along Galveston and Galveston Bay would be a reasonable estimate.

Inland rainfall

This is a much lower priority due to Laura’s forward speed. As I hope you understand by now, this will not be another Hurricane Harvey. In terms of rainfall, we can probably expect 1 to 3 inches with the current track. Should Laura make landfall further down the coast, we can probably anticipate widespread totals of 6 to 10 inches, with higher isolated amounts.

Should you evacuate?

If you live along the immediate coast and are under a mandatory evacuation order, as Galveston Island is, the answer is yes. You should heed local officials who are making difficult calls.

After that, it’s really a personal decision for you and your family. How high is your risk tolerance? Are you willing to spend several very intense, and yes, scary hours in the middle of a hurricane? Do you have a safe place in your home to shelter within? Can you survive without power for several days? The age-old advice during a hurricane is that you evacuate from a storm surge, but take shelter in your home from wind. Effectively, for the Houston area, this means the closer you are to the coast, the higher your risk for surge. These “zip zone” maps (click here to download medium, and large-sized maps) show the risk in this area by zip codes.

All evacuations should be completed by Wednesday, at noon. This is about the earliest reasonable times that winds would arrive in the Houston metro area.

We will update again by 2:30pm CT.

POSTED AT 6:40 AM CT TUESDAY: Unfortunately we don’t have great news to report this morning. The overnight trends with Laura are not good and everyone in the greater Houston and Galveston metro area needs to be making final preparations for a potential hurricane landfall. After moving off Cuba overnight, the storm made a slight westward jog, and this has had the effect of nudging several model runs west. This is likely to bring the center of the storm closer to Houston, and this is not good.

Track forecast

It now seems highly likely that Laura will make landfall somewhere between Freeport and Southwestern Louisiana—with the most probable location between Galveston Bay and the Texas-Louisiana border on Wednesday night shortly before midnight, or early Thursday morning. This forecast is a worst-case scenario for the Beaumont area, and a mandatory evacuation order is in effect for Jefferson County. The situation is not much better for the Houston area. Please note: The official forecast track shown below will likely be adjusted westward, toward Houston, at 10am CT this morning.

Now that Laura is over the open Gulf of Mexico and strengthening, confidence in the track should increase later today. Further changes will certainly be possible due to wobbles or other factors in the storm’s movement, however.

It is very important to really understand where this storm will go. Hurricanes have effects over a large area, but their strongest winds are generally clustered tightly around the core, or to its northeast. And storm surge is significantly greater to the right of a land-falling center. For this reason, track really matters (see section below on Hurricane Ike).

Intensity forecast

As ever, this remains problematic. The storm will now spend nearly two days over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Laura is actually over the most explosively warm waters right now. One of the best measures of the potential for intensification is “Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential,” and anything above a value of 80 is considered fertile for rapid strengthening. Here is the most recent map of heat potential, with Laura’s track overlaid.

Unfortunately, Laura is going to miss the less explosive “blue” water to its north. (This feature actually predates Tropical Storm Marco). However, it also will not have the very deep pool of warm water that some past hurricanes have had to draw upon. A final consideration is that due to Laura’s relatively fast forward motion, presently 17 miles to the west-northwest, the storm will not be as effected by heat potential as a more slow moving system. Bottom line: The Gulf is conducive to strengthening, but it is not as quite explosive as it could be.

Another factor in intensity is wind shear, and unfortunately that is expected to remain on the low side until Laura nears shore. Add this all up, and the National Hurricane Center now forecasts Laura to come ashore with 115-mph winds, as a Category 3 hurricane. This is a pretty reasonable estimate, but it is only that. Laura could well be stronger, or a bit weaker.

Hurricane Ike

If you’re looking for an analog for what to expect in Houston from Laura, probably the best recent storm is Hurricane Ike. This storm made landfall on the east end of Galveston Island in September, 2008, and followed a track up the western side of Galveston Bay. It had maximum sustained winds of 110 mph.

It is not a perfect comparison, as Laura probably will be more intense as it comes ashore with more damaging winds; and Ike was a larger storm so it produced a significantly more powerful storm surge we will probably see with Laura. But the reason I want to show the graphic below is that, very roughly, it provides a way to set expectations for Houston and Galveston.

If Laura’s track ultimately is east of this line—which for now seems likely, but is not guaranteed—effects in Houston ultimately will probably be less significant than Ike. If the storm tracks along, or west of this line, winds and potentially even surge in Houston will be worse. It might not be too strong to say “unimaginably worse,” because Houston has not really experienced an intense wind storm since Hurricane Carla in 1961. This would require sheltering in a safe place. If you’re looking for a worst case scenario for Houston, it would be a landfall near Freeport or San Luis Pass.

For those who did not live here at the time, Hurricane Ike caused $30 billion in damages in Texas, mostly due to storm surge. This report provides a good analysis of the storm’s winds. It can be summarized as: one-to-two weeks of power outages, lots of downed trees, and roof damages. So like we said, a storm east of the line above would probably result in less of that. West, and all bets are off.

We will update again by 10:30 am CT. By then we probably can begin to talk realistically about what most of Houston will experience in terms of winds, waves, and rain; and when to expect it.

Good evening. We don’t have any real good news or bad news tonight on the Laura front relative to Eric’s post earlier today. I would not change any of the scenario percentages he put down either. I was hoping we might have some good news, but alas, we are not there yet. This is explained below.

The 7 PM National Hurricane Center Advisory maintains Laura on a course for somewhere between Houston and central Louisiana as a borderline major hurricane Wednesday night.

Since our post this afternoon, a Hurricane Watch was issued for Galveston Bay and Port Bolivar into central Louisiana. A Tropical Storm Watch is posted from San Luis Pass through Port Bolivar. And a Storm Surge Watch is posted for all areas north of San Luis Pass.

Laura is about to emerge in the Gulf of Mexico this evening off Cuba, entering the healthiest environment it has yet had for strengthening.

Laura looks a bit ragged overall, but it is putting together a bit of a core tonight, if not something mimicking an eye-like feature. Once this enters the Gulf with high water temperatures and low shear, there is little to hold it back from organizing steadily. That’s our going thought at least. We will see if some slightly “cooler” water that has been present in the eastern Gulf acts to keep the intensification slow and steady rather than explosive over the next day or so. At some point, as long as Laura is able to develop a firm inner-core, we would expect intensification to perhaps become more rapid. Either way, the odds of seeing a major hurricane in the northwest Gulf of Mexico remain pretty substantial.

So what about track?

The million dollar question. We will be honest here. We don’t yet feel comfortable. Here is the problem we have been facing. The tropical models, ones that are tuned to handle tropical storms and hurricanes, have been incredibly consistent the last couple days in indicating that the landfall point would be somewhere in southwest Louisiana or close to Port Arthur. This explains why the National Hurricane Center forecast has frankly not moved much either. The thing myself, Eric, and a lot of other meteorologists have been squirming in our chairs over despite this is the European ensemble. The Euro is generally considered the “gold standard” for most things weather forecasting. It runs an ensemble, where the model has the initial conditions tweaked just a little and is run 51 different times. In most years, this model has been really tough to beat. By no means is it perfect; it, too, has its moments.

Well, for the last couple days it has continued to show risks of the storm tracking farther south and west of the tropical models, coming in anywhere from Corpus Christi to Galveston. Today has been no different. The very latest run (pushed out in the last 90 minutes or so) has shifted a little to the north, narrowing some but not as much as either of us would have liked to see for Houston’s sake.

Tracks of the 12z EPS vs 18z EPS lows, tracks in general shift a bit up the coast #Laura images from https://t.co/b4vzQrTBpF pic.twitter.com/XvTF4zunzK

— Allan Huffman (@RaleighWx) August 25, 2020

So how should you be interpreting this information?

The reality is that despite the NHC track focused in Louisiana, despite very consistent behavior from the GFS model and from tropical models, the model we tend to consider the best in the business still shows a distinct risk that Houston and Galveston could end up much too close to the center of Laura and could still take a direct hit. Those are just the facts. That trend we saw in this evening run of the ensemble may continue to shift northeast overnight. We don’t know. But at this specific point in time, you should by no means let your guard down with respect to this system. You will need to be ready to act quickly tomorrow in case something changes. Fortunately, we should get our answers tomorrow morning or early afternoon on how real a risk this is for Houston or if it will be another in a litany of close calls for our region. Eric will have the very latest in the morning, no later than 8:00 AM.

I will not lie. (We never do, and that’s a promise you can bank on). When the National Hurricane Center issued its updated track forecast at 10 am CT this morning I had my doubts. Forecasters there seemed too conservative in not moving the track of Laura closer to Houston, as that is where a lot of the model data indicated it would go. However, in going over all of the just released data from 12z models, their track forecast (shown below) now looks pretty good. So, kudos to the pros in Miami.

What does the 12z data show? Several models have made slight adjustments eastward today, but the most significant movement has come from the UKMET model, produced by the United Kingdom. This is not the world’s best global forecast model, but it is competitive, and something we often look at. In the case of Laura, it has had some of the best performance to date since tracking began a few days. This meant we have weighted it a little bit higher for this storm.

One of the things that has concerned us is that the UKMET, although an outlier, had been frequently bringing Laura to the central or upper Texas coast. This would have placed Houston, Galveston, and the upper Texas coast on the powerful right side of the storm. However, in a just released run of the model, the storm’s landfall location has made a sizable jump east, from near Corpus Christi to the Texas-Louisiana border:

This brings the UKMET more in line with other global models in predicting a landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border, or slightly east of there. This gives us more confidence in a solution that brings Laura onshore just far enough east of Houston to keep the worst of its winds, waves, and rains away from the area. But this does not mean the track forecast is locked down—we still have a fair amount of uncertainty there. There are some very fine details in the positioning of several features in the upper atmosphere, and these could easily move a bit in the next day or so. That would be enough to nudge the forecast back toward Houston. So please, do not let your guard down and keep making preparations. But maybe, breathe slightly easier if you live in Houston. If you live in Beaumont or points east, the threat remains very high.

One thing I think we can answer is when we should have clarity on what Laura is really going to do. I am reasonably confident that the track will be dialed in by this time tomorrow, after Laura has come across the western edge of Cuba and emerged into the Gulf of Mexico. By this time it should be forming a more well defined center of circulation, and the models will have ingested better initial conditions. So our long, uncertain wait for some answers should finally come to an end within 12 to 24 hours. As ever, thank you for your patience.

To update the percentages I’ve been using for various scenarios, this is what I would now go with:

Scenario One: Near or direct impact on Houston by a powerful hurricane. (30 percent)

Scenario Two: Powerful hurricane near or east of Texas-Louisiana border (70 percent)

Scenario Three: Weaker storm, central or southeastern Louisiana (~0 percent)

I will be conducting a Facebook Live video at 2pm CT that you can find on our page there. Matt will provide our next update no later than 9pm CT tonight.