Hello and welcome to another edition of the Daily Bolt with your host, Dr. Jeff Dilly. Today's topic, Dorian. The devil's in the details.
Sit back and relax and enjoy this episode of the Daily Bolt. So it is Monday morning, it is Labor Day 2019, and Hurricane Dorian has now spent 13 hours with its eye basically traveling roughly along the northern coast of Grand Bahama island, which is not a huge island. There is very little in the atmosphere aloft to push Dorian any particular way. But it continues to turn in a now west northwesterly direction, ever so slightly north of west, largely following the northern coast of Grand Bahama Island.
And it's still only about halfway across from the fact that Grand Bahama island isn't eastward or west east, depending on which you prefer, oriented island. And it has been largely tracking along the northern coast, give or take a mile or so. That means that the residents of Grand Bahama island have been experiencing in many parts of the island, hurricane force winds and even major hurricane force winds now for over 13 hours. That is a long time to be hit with winds of this particular force.
And even though the winds are now weaker, the maximum winds are a bit weaker for Dorian, now about 155mph sustained with gusts up to about 190 or so. It's weaker than when it crashed into Grand Abaco island yesterday. It was moving faster. It was moving at still what for a hurricane is a modest pace of about 7 mph.
For much of the morning, Dorian has been creeping at about 1 mile per hour. That means, yes, virtually no movement. The only significant change has been this ever so slight course change direction wise, from about 275 degrees to 280 degrees to 285 degrees. It's unclear whether this is a wobble that is actually directly related to the coastline.
That's not inconceivable. It's also not inconceivable that there is some tendency for the storm itself just to respond to whatever tiny little bit of a steering current there is, although that seems highly unlikely given that it is basically in a part of the atmosphere where aloft there is basically no steering flow at all. And so it could be just simply tied to the coastline with the storm trying to maximize its conversion of energy from potential energy to kinetic energy, with the, with heat energy from the ocean underneath being the main source. That's an interesting research question that will be answered in the future.
The question is now what happens next? That's still a very interesting question. And this almost stall of Dorian over The Grand Bahama island is an interesting factor. It now has prompted some of the numerical models, which I take a look at this morning, to pull Dorian away from quite such a close approach to the US Southeast coast.
Getting to a fairly close approach of the eastern Florida coast, then staying a little bit farther away from the coast as the curvature occurs, until it gets to the vicinity of the North Carolina coast, which juts out quite far eastward in the Atlantic compared to the states farther south. And there might be a landfall on the North Carolina Outer Banks. There are other numerical model predictions that take Dorian directly to the coast, does not really bring the center of the eye on shore, but brings part of the eyewall on shore and has a track up again following the coastline almost to a T the entire way up from the East Florida coast all the way up to North Carolina. That would be potentially the worst possible solution because it would subject the densely populated coastal area to the strongest winds in the eyewall for an extended period of time.
It would also bring the strongest storm surge up ahead of it, as the east winds from the hurricane helped help to drive water westward and northward and provide for an extended period of storm surge. Regardless, most of the solutions do have Dorian close enough to the US east coast so that at worst case, there will be a significant increase in winds as the models almost all predict that the wind field of Dorian will expand, which means that the hurricane force winds will extend farther off in the center and especially the tropical storm force winds will expand out from the center. There will be rain bands associated with hurricane hitting the coastal and near interior sections, and there will be signal significant beach erosion. These are pretty much given consequences of Dorian regardless of the track.
The question is, and the details, how close to the coast does it get? Where does the edge of the eye wall fall? And that would be a big determining factor in just how much damage Dorian can do structurally to buildings, storm surge, coastal flooding. Certainly areas that are prone to it with any tropical storm will likely experience some of it again in Dorian.
The extent of that though, depends again on the track. And we're not talking huge deviations in the track. We're talking differences of maybe 25 to 45 miles in terms of where the eye is from the coast, whether it's on the coast, whether it is 45 miles away from the coast makes a big, big, big difference. And that's why the devil is in the details.
The problem is, as Dorian continues to slow, this all gets drawn out farther and farther. And the worst people experiencing that are the people of the Grand Bahamas, who were hoping for more of a glancing blow and who instead appear to be the main brunt of what Dorian's damage is going to be, at least in the immediate term. There are no signs of Dorian picking up a lot of speed anytime soon. So it's going to continue to spend the rest of the day today crawling along the north coast, eventually breaking off.
The coast actually turns a little bit to the southeast about 10, 15 miles from where Dorian center is now. And so the center will eventually get back over open water for a period of time. And by that point, an approaching weather system from the north and west that's really going to be affecting much of the eastern US May start to provide a little bit of independence for Dorian to move a little bit faster. Lots of details, but they make a huge difference in this particular case.
And we'll keep our eye on Dorian as the next days unfold. But we're going to be talking about Dorian, it looks like, for several more days. And just not to let you folks in the Pacific think that we're not paying attention to you. Yes, I am aware that there is a strong tropical storm Juliet that formed a couple days ago off the coast of Mexico.
It is due to to strengthen into a hurricane today and head out more into the open eastern Pacific, perhaps down the road. It could prove to be a threat to Hawaii by the end of the week. But at this point in time, it's too early to tell if Juliet's going to do anything more than just be a hazard to the shipping lanes. That's all for today's Daily bolt.
I'm Dr. Jeff Tilly. Good night, good morning, good afternoon. Depending on when you're hearing this, and God bless.