TLDR: Nicholas continues to dump on the Gulf Coast, Shanghai/Ningbo starting to reopen, and why you shouldn’t get excited about models episode eleventy-billion or something.
Nicholas is still being tracked as tropical depression. By far the biggest impact of this thing has been rain and ongoing flooding along the Gulf Coast. Here’s the forecast rain swath for the next few days as the remnants drift east …
Tropical Storm (formerly Chanthu) is wrapping up it’s S turn off the coast from Shanghai and is headed towards Kyushu (the southernmost main island of Japan) as a tropical storm. It will bring rain across Japan over the next couple of days, but winds should remain well below hurricane (typhoon) intensity. Operations are starting to resume in the ports of Shanghai and Ningbo, which is important as these two port are responsible for over 10% of the entire world’s container traffic. A three or four day disruption may not sound like much, but a four day outage equates to around one million TEU’s of disruption in traffic, which has a rippling effect especially given the already messy situation in global shipping.
NHC is watching a couple of disturbances in the Atlantic. One, off the US East coast, might move north and impact North Carolina and points north as a tropical system. The usual suspects seem excited about AL95, the disturbance off of Africa. The last couple of GFS runs have it spinning up in to a fairly organized/intense system, but the intensity and track have a lot of uncertainty. Here is a comparison using the cool slider thingee function in wordpress, showing the 00z and 06z runs, forecast for Friday night about 10 days from now (the 24th). Grab the <> thing and slide back and forth to see the difference …
That’s actually pretty tight, but reinforces the fact that any speculation as to who (if anyone) is doomed based on this kind of thing is pointless. I can’t say this enough: until the hurricane center uses the magic words (“interests <somewhere> should <do something>”) in their outlooks or advisories, please don’t stress out over it. If you have a hurricane plan then you’re fine – it’s 5 days from the leeward islands, and nearly two weeks away from the US even if it does spin up (which is likely but not certain yet) or come this way (which is very uncertain – a track offshore is more likely). And to the media people: stop with the fear mongering. Recall the fable of the irresponsible kid and the wolf who heroically ended his reign of terror …
