Gustav is still a strong tropical storm with maximum sustained winds near 70 mph as it slowly moves along the southern coast of Jamaica.  The center will move away from the island nation into extremely warm waters.  This combined with virtually no wind shear could allow Gustav to deepen rapidly and become a major hurricane.  In fact the new Hurricane WRF model brings Gustav to a monstrous Category 5 storm over the Gulf of Mexico.  Now the H-WRF is an outlier on the intensity guidance, however, given the extremely favorable environment, this strength is not completely out of the realm of possibilities. 

The storm will move into the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend and is still on track to make landfall by Tuesday between Galveston and Mobile.  The most likely landfall zone is centered on the Louisiana coast.  Some computer guidance is suggesting a landfall just south and west of New Orleans. This would be a disaster if that track were to verify!  The Crescent City is completely surrounded by water with Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi to the south.  On a track to the southwest of the city, water from the Gulf of Mexico would be forced up both the Mississippi and into Pontchartrain.  Most of the flooding during Katrina in 2005 was caused mostly from water in Lake Pontchartrain due to the track of the storm.  We still have several days before landfall to watch this and lets hope this group of models is in error.

Hanna has become a little more organized tonight with sustained winds now up to 50 mph.  Strengthening is expected to be gradual and nowhere near as robust as Gustav, but Hanna will likely become a hurricane by Saturday.  The latest track takes Hanna northwest then west, and possibly bending the storm southwest toward the Bahamas by the middle of next week.  We will know more about Hanna’s future over the next couple of days.