September 17, 2017

Hurricane Irma In Atlanta Georgia

Written By:  Andrew Eide

I wish to provide you with an update to Hurricane Irma. In the graphic provided in this Blog you can see that Irma was at that time coming up on the Islands which are located South of Florida. At that time there were several prospective tracks for Irma.

One was it hits Miami and then runs up the East Coast to hit South Carolina. Another was that it crossed over Miami to head into the Gulf of Mexico. The third track was that it would hit Miami, turn North, and run up the center of Florida and then North through the middle of the State of Georgia where we live, including crossing directly over Atlanta Metro where we live, finally ending up in Tennessee.

The update I’m giving you today is that Hurricane Irma was downgraded to a Tropical Storm just before he hit the Southern border of Georgia.

Another thing is that while Irma was initially scheduled to run straight up the middle of the State of Florida, it actually headed West and ran up the West Coast of Florida. What this did was cause Irma to run up the Western part of the State of Georgia instead of going directly over the Atlanta Metro area.

So what did this do for the weather in Atlanta Metro where we live?

Initial forecasts were for sustained winds of 60 to 70 mph with gusts close to 90 mph with lots of rain and possibility of numerous tornadoes. Since Irma moved to the West of Atlanta what we ended up with, at the worst part of the storm, were sustained winds of 35 to 50 mph with gusts close to 60 mph with moderate to heavy rains but not a constant rain.

Hard to predict where a storm will hit and what the damage will be but it is always prudent to predict the highest level of damage and winds and rain rather than to under-predict it as they did with Hurricane Harvey that hit the State of Texas.


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