Emily Hype? Outer Banks Flashback

The track for potential-possible-Gabrielle-to-be is looking a lot like Hurricane Emily in 1993. There is no significance to comparing one hurricane track to another of course, but I'm sure folks on The Outer Banks are recalling memories of Hurricane Emily in 1993, and wondering if this is the satellite picture is what they'll wake up to Sunday or Monday morning:

I was in college at the time, and the satellite image shown above was one of the earliest really impressive Internet color satellite images out of NASA (they do this kind of stuff daily now). They didn't have the web back then, of course, so I must have FTP'd it or gotten it off of USENET. I though that was the greatest thing and was printing it out on my brand new 150-DPI color printer.

GOOGLE MAP OF THE OUTER BANKS:

It was also an impressive storm in its own right, and impressive in the teasing that it did to the North Carolina coast. Never officially making landfall, it condemned more than 500 homes (pretty impressive considering the thin strip of land if affected, see Google Map above), caused a 10 foot storm surge and dropped more than 7 inches of rain. Radar images, which were very rare on the Internet in those days, are available here.

EMILY'S TRACK FROM OUR Google Hurricane Tracker (PREMIUM | PRO)

This week's storm hasn't even officially formed yet, and models continue to reduce it's eventual strength (click here for an even sadder NMM loop than yesterday's, showing the lowest pressure of the storm for each model run in the last two days). The Model Spread [JessePedia] tracks, however, are still reminiscent of Emily. Our official track & intensity map (PREMIUM | PRO) calls for landfall near Morehead City as a Category 1 Hurricane Sunday night.

A pretty cool GFDL Forecast Model 3-D Forecast animation is available on this website. These forecasts were mostly run post-storm; 14 years later nothing that cool is available on the web in real-time (to my knowledge).