>>14484541
From Jim Stone (http://82.221.129.208):
August 29 early morning IDA update
Ida (was) a very strong cat 2 I figured might make it to cat 3 and then all the weather maps updated just before midnight and it fell all the way down to a cat 1. That was not expected. The eye will likely make landfall between 3 and 6 AM and the strongest winds will precede the eye actually making landfall. It will obviously be windy, the power will be out, lots of trees will be down, boats will be washed ashore, a few houses will collapse, trailer parks will be food and well built houses will have broken windows and roof damage.
However, it does not look like there's any chance Ida will be a devastator.
There will be gas stations and billboards blown over and one hell of a mess though.
Uniformly, earth.nullschool.net, Ventusky, and Windy all agree - Ida is a cat 1 as of 12 AM August 29. They won't update for a while again and I won't even be out of bed before this is over unless Ida stalls. I was expecting Ida to go to cat 3 and instead it died, (at least with the feed I got.) Hurricanes do not usually weaken at night.
IDA UPDATE: As of 4 PM CST this is my prediction from going over the data, I did not pay attention to forecasts.
Ida is moving too rapidly to build up to what it could have been. Even still, if it does not get stalled, it will land as a strong category 2 right around 3 AM in central Louisiana. It is not an enormous hurricane but it is a healthy one, and despite being cat 1 right now at least it held onto hurricane strength through the day (hurricanes weaken during the day) and it is extremely likely to pick up significant strength just before sunset and into the night. It is still positioned well for strengthening.
They do appear to be using weather mod on this hurricane, but I think that this time around they are trying to weaken it.
If it lands as a cat 2, there will be chaos. A real Cat 2 will be out of this world worse than the B.S. tropical storms (like Patricia) that were pumped up with fake data. There will be widespread power outages, wrecked homes, and downed trees over vast distances.
Hurrican winds, properly measured like the Galveston hurricane, are measured at ground level. The people rating this hurricane are not doing that, they are just taking the max wind speeds anywhere in the eye wall at any elevation. That's not how it is done, but you know - woke and common core. They never got an education.