Hurricane Irene’s Threat to Eastern Seaboard, D.C. & NYC

What has become good news for Florida and its neighboring states has become what looks like bad news for much of the northern and central parts of the Eastern Seaboard.  Hurricane Irene is now currently projected to miss Florida and head further up the East Coast.  If you have tracked hurricane cone-patterns, you understand that these projected paths sometimes change drastically.  Sometimes the hurricanes even peter out or lessen severely.  And sometimes they get worse.

The new graphic from NOAA’s Satellite tracking image shows a weekend landfall with North Carolina but the left side of the cone path still shows a threat for South Carolina.  The center part of the path shows 8:00 AM Sunday as being the expected arrival time in the surrounding areas around Washington D.C., which puts New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other locations at risk over the hours after that.

Again, these cones often change and the changes are generally greater the further out the storm arrival time is.  Keep in mind that this is right after 2:00 PM on Tuesday and that leaves quite some time for the change to occur.

During the writing of this, there was a Virginia-based earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 to 6.0 per various reports.

After going through Hurricane Ike in Houston in September 2008, I took these pictures inside the 610 Loop in Houston less than an hour after the storm passed to show how much the damage can still be when you are even 50 miles inland from a hurricane landfall.

JON C. OGG

A larger picture of the NOAA satellite storm projected path is below, and keep in mind that this can still change greatly between now and this weekend.