2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

My parents retired to Florida back in the 80s. My dad would get up early, go out to get the newspapers, but one morning he was met by a gator in the driveway. Until he died, he never went out in the morning without a huge flashlight and even checked under the car.

 

Newest cone: Valdosta may get some rain on Monday.

 

I moved to Florida in 1990 and was pretty lucky with Hurricanes until the trifecta of 2004 with Charley, Frances and Jeanne. Charley was nasty but quick. Like it was done in about two hours. Left some nasty damage though. Frances crawled through the state and dumped a shit ton of rain. Jeanne was just evil. Nailed my city head on.

Left inland Florida for coastal Pinellas County in 2006 and things were fine until Irma in 2017. That was probably the scariest time because when it started tracking to Florida it was heading to the East coast around where my parents live so I was trying to convince them to come my way, but 24 hours later it was headed right through the center of Miami-Dade and it nailed the Keys, but continued to shift further west and all of sudden Tampa Bay looked like it was going to be decimated with flooding and storm surge, etc.

But something strange happened. It came on land somewhere on the edges of Collier County and instead of holding form and ripping up the coastline, the storm kind of scattered itself after hitting that Naples area and part of it shifted east and went through the west-center of the state (Eastern Hillsborough County, Polk County and into the Orlando area) and spared the west central and north central coastline of the worst stuff.

 

Great. The new cone has it skirting the coast with it dead centering Onslow Bay. Hopefully it just stays a weak storm.
Supposedly this is the earliest we've gotten to "I" since they started naming storms.

 

Not rooting for any sort of tropical damage, but man, we REALLY need some rain in our area. It's been unrelenting 90-plus with nasty humidity for nearly a month straight now. We need a break.

 

Every letter of the alphabet has been the earliest on record this year.

2020.

 

Just looking at the location of the center of the disturbance, it's been drifting north-northwest for the past 48 hours, with no discernable steering pattern. I like the chances of this to eventually miss the coastline altogether, although tropical storms usually do the exact opposite of what you expect.

 

It seems to be trending East with each new map. I hope it avoids the coast, but I wouldn’t mind catching some of the outer bands in my area.

 

We'll see how things play out, but it has a way to go to surpass 2005, when they ran out of names and had to resort to Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta for the last six. Wilma hit me a week before Halloween, and the last two formed after Thanksgiving.

 

This season is definitely ahead of the 2005 pace, though. Katrina hit at the very end of August, and we're only two away from the K storm.
There was a decent little lull in August 2005, though. The H storm (Harvey) formed on Aug. 2 and was the earliest for its letter until this year. Then there were only three in the entire month of August, two of which were inconsequential.

 

A good rainmaker that kept people home for 2-3 days wouldn't be the worst thing that happens to this state.