Tropical Storm Alex Makes a Run for the Border

The models, many of which had been shifting to the upper Texas coast, seem to be moving back down toward the border region. The current 5 day forecast from the NHC has it moving in there as a category 2 storm. Dr. Jeff Masters updates:

The latest 12 UTC (7am CDT) runs of our most reliable computer models have come into much better agreement. A consensus forecast arrived at by averaging together most or all of the tracks of our top models–the GFS, ECMWF, GFDL, NOGAPS, HWRF, UKMET, and GFDN–is pretty much what NHC always uses as the basis of their forecast. This consensus forecast has narrowed in on the region just south of the Texas/Mexico border as being the most likely landfall location, with the usual cone of uncertainty surrounding it. The computer model that had been making the northernmost landfall predictions, the Canadian model, is now projecting a landfall 100 miles south of the Texas/Mexico border. There has been a general southward shift of the models in their latest runs, and the most northerly landfall location, near Port Mansfield, is now being predicted by the HWRF model. The earliest landfall time is Wednesday morning, and the latest is Wednesday night. Which model should you trust? Last year, the best performing models at the 3 day forecast period were the GFS, Canadian, ECMWF, and GFDL.

I wouldn’t say that anyone on the Texas coast is out of the woods just yet. Keep an eye on Alex. These storms can be incredibly unpredictable.