Future Joaquin No Sandy, But Could Get Interesting

UPDATE 3:00 PM: The latest model update, which just came in, does shift the average track left from Rhode Island to New York City. The plot thickens, but I still stand by what I said below.

ORIGINAL REPORT (2:00 PM): There's much chatter in the meteorological community about the European model this afternoon; in a big change to last night's forecast, it has a solution showing a hurricane slamming into the Virginia coast this weekend ... but will it be the next Superstorm Sandy? Probably not, in my estimation.

Tropical Depression 11 will likely be named Tropical Storm Joaquin later today, but there are a lot more things (statistically) working against than for the Euro's solution.

At a similar latitude, the bulk of the (ATCF) track models were convinced of a mid-Atlantic hit for Sandy. The same is not true today (see graphic above). We're about 4.5 days out from landfall as predicted by the Euro now ... here's how the Sandy tracks looked that far out (not even close!)

It was further out, about six days out when we saw the first model predicting a big East Coast storm in 2012. No matter how close, in the meteorological community, we never change a forecast based on one model run -- even for the European (which did predict Sandy's landfall ahead of the U.S. model).

Bigger storms are also easier for the models to forecast; Sandy was already a Cat 1 hurricane at this point in its development; this little guy is officially a depression right now. Finally, Sandy is the only hurricane to turn left into the Northeast Coast (of course, I said that before Sandy too).