Social Media Notwithstanding, Things Are NOT Chill With Hurricane Dorian

Category 5 Hurricane Dorian in an incredibly awesome
satellite shot this morning

Hurricane Dorian continued to be an extremely dangerous storm. As of this morning, it has been upgraded as a worst case Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 160 mph, says the National Hurricane Center. Yes, it managed to strengthen even more overnight. It's slowly churning its way into the northern Bahamas.

By the way, Dorian makes this the first known time there have been Category 5 storms in the eastern Atlantic on four consecutive years.

The tone on some of social media yesterday was, "Oh, this is great. Dorian is going to miss Florida, and might miss the Carolinas. All is good."

Not so fast.

First of all, we need to deal with the Bahamas. We'll get into Florida a bit further down in this post, and things aren't all that rosy in the Sunshine State.

A hurricane this strong is bad enough. When it stalls and sits over pretty much one spot, like Dorian is likely to, it's exponentially worse. You saw the destruction Hurricane Michael caused in the Florida Panhandle last year.

Michael was moving right along, and unleashed the bulk of its destruction in just a few hours.

Imagine having to deal with 100 mph sustained winds for 30 straight hours, like Freeport in the Bahamas could experience. The longer the winds blow, the more opportunity for things to blow away and people to get hurt or killed.

Granted, buildings in the Bahamas are often basically concrete fortresses to ward off hurricanes, but they can only take so much. Plus the couple feet of rain or more they are going to have to deal with isn't easy, either.

Now, let's get into Florida. As I've kept saying all week with Dorian, forecasting the track of a hurricane isn't easy. It's especially difficult when steering currents collapse, as is happening with Dorian. That's why it's stalling out in the Bahamas.

Dorian was moving steadily westward, propelled by a high pressure system north of it. So at least the storm had some sort of meteorological "guidance" that made it comparatively easy to predict where it was going.

Now, Dorian is entering an area with no strong steering currents. Subtle little features in the atmosphere can play a big role in where Dorian goes. And since Dorian is going to get so close to the Florida coast, there's no room for error. But there will surely be errors in forecasting, because this is such a difficult situation to predict. Every mile counts as to how badly this will affect Florida.

The forecast still has Dorian making a hard right turn Tuesday and Wednesday, moving northward offshore, parallel to the Florida coast.

But what if that right turn happens just a little later than currently forecast? In that case, Dorian could still come ashore in eastern Florida as a major hurricane. That's not the official forecast, but the National Hurricane Center still has eastern Florida in the so-called "cone of uncertainty."

That means the NHC is acknowledging that Florida could still be in play here.

Even if Hurricane Dorian somehow behaves exactly as forecasters think it will (Ha!) the central east coast of Florida is in for a nasty few days.

There's a tropical storm warning for that region, and meteorologists have upgraded the wind forecast for populated areas like West Palm Beach, Melbourne, Port St. Lucie and Palm Bay. Winds there could go to 74 to 110 mph, especially if Dorian nudges just a few miles closer to the coast than currently expected.

As Dorian is a slow mover, this part of Florida might endure at least tropical storm conditions from late tonight into Wednesday. That's a long time to have to deal with this.

We won't even get into the threat in the Carolinas later in the week. That's still definitely in play.

Dorian has probably reached peak intensity this morning. You'll probably hear starting today and going into Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that Dorian is "weakening" so everything's OK, right.

Or not. True, it will probably weaken. Winds with Dorian three days from now might "only" be, say, 120 mph. That's still a problem, isn't it?

I don't mean to be Mr. Gloom and Doom, because there's still a great chance this won't be a worst case scenario for anywhere in the United States. But people in the areas to be affected by the storm should not let their guard down. It could still be a helluva ride.