Note: Some of this was written on Tuesday, September 9th.

Good afternoon everyone. Sorry that I didn’t post to the blog on Monday evening, but I was trying to rest my back. It’s getting better, but it can still be quite painful. Nevertheless, I still managed to update the home page several times with the latest info on Ike. The next several days I’ll have off so I will have some time to update the site and the blog more often. Anyway, I’ve continued to track Ike just like mostly everyone, and the storm’s track is becoming more and more interesting since the storm keeps going west.

During much of Ike’s lifetime, there has been a strong ridge of high pressure over the Atlantic. Two things people need to understand with hurricanes are: 1.) They move like a hockey puck in that they need some other force to push it along, and 2.) They often take the path of least resistance. So, for example, our subtropical ridge that has been dominant in the Atlantic over the past week, and actually was also responsible for the very warm weather in the Northeast last week, has been driving our Hurricane Ike along to the West or West-Northwest. It also was responsible for a bit of the West to Southwest jaunt the storm had late last week.

In addition, there have been shortwave troughs that have been pushing into the Eastern United States over the past several days including one that brought some severe thunderstorms with torrential rains to the Northeast on Tuesday morning. Hurricanes look for these troughs because they erode the strong ridge, and provide those weaknesses that these tropical systems look to exploit. Well, the troughs have kept bypassing the ridge, and not forcing it to relent. It even appeared at one point that Hurricane Ike was going to head west into Northeastern Mexico, and miss the United States completely.

Starting on Wednesday though, things began to change as the models began to show the ridge dominating much of the Southeastern United States, especially East Texas was pushing eastward, which created the alleyway for Ike to come up into the Upper Texas Coast. The storm has turned to the right in the last 24 hours because it is simply moving around the periphery of the ridge. Now, on Wednesday, forecasters had also indicated that the intensity of Ike would be around a Category Three or Four when it made landfall. Unfortunately, forecasting the future intensity of a hurricane is much more difficult than predicting the future track. The dynamics of the inner core of a hurricane are still a mystery to forecasters and researchers, and Ike was a classic example of why.