Denis Phillips on Sara’s Timing, Track, Intensity and Florida Impact
Friday, November 15 Update: Below is yesterday’s (Thursday) Sara update. There’s been some great news over the past 24 hours for us who live in the Tampa area. Here are Denis Phillips’ latest thoughts this morning on the storm.
The update from yesterday: The models are starting to show some agreement as to where a Tropical Storm or even Hurricane Sara (the system isn’t officially named Sara yet) will go. The bad news for Florida is that it looks at this point like this one’s heading right toward us. The good news is that it looks like the storm will not be tropical storm or hurricane strength by the time it gets here.
The “future Sara,” as Denis Phillips from our weather partner ABC Action News calls it, has stayed over land for a while now. That weakens the storm. Denis says the longer it stays over land, the weaker it’ll be by the time it does arrive in Florida. Right now Denis thinks “AL19” will keep moving slowly over the weekend.
Sara’s Track
Right now most of the models show future Sara hitting the northern part of Florida right near Tallahassee. That doesn’t mean the Tampa area is completely in the clear. The storm hasn’t fully formed yet so models at this point are best guesses. But there is a lot of agreement in the models and they’ve been pretty accurate so far this season – even before storms have fully formed.
Sara’s Timing
Any impact from Sara for Florida would probably happen Wednesday, according to Denis. Again as to how strong the storm would be, that’s still up in the air. But it sounds like they’ll have a pretty good idea on that by the end of this weekend once the storm is done over land.
This Weekend in Florida
Before Sara does whatever she does, we’ll actually have some great weather this weekend in Florida. Temperatures will dip a little bit which will be welcome. When you wake up Saturday and Sunday morning, temps will be right around 60. Daytime highs should top out in the low 80s. But a much bigger cold front is on the way in about a week.
UPDATE: Denis has updated his forecast regarding Sara’s arrival in Florida. Here’s the Friday, November 15 update.
