"Give me Five....AGAIN!"

Wow...talk about your explosion of tropical development...Felix is now a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 165 mph: as bad an hombre as they get in the Atlantic basin. Kinda like a whiskey-runnin' '69 Chevelle SS with nitrous boost - when that switch is thrown, it's Katy-bar-the-door.

After grazing the Dutch A-B-C islands, Felix is cruising dead at Belize, a track parallel though a bit south of Dean. Excellent symmetry. No hostile upper level winds. Superior outflow boundaries. Nicely formed eye. Completely encircling convection bands. Like a Mack truck you really don't want to be standing in front of. If it's any saving grace, the wind field is quite small with this storm, with hurricane force winds going only 30 miles out from the center.

Interesting that Felix is moving faster than Dean did, laterally, cruising right now at 21 mph to the west. The only saving grace to this storm's on-shore impact will be that forward movement should it continue...it limits torrential rainfall somewhat as it doesn't stay around long enough to be catastrophic.

Remember, you can click on maps to enlarge them...Felix should rake the Nicaraguan and then Honduran coast on Tuesday before setting its sights on Belize and Belize City late Wednesday afternoon. I would imagine that Felix should still be a Cat 5, though interaction with the aforementioned coastlines Tuesday may add a tad of friction to the circulation and drop its power slightly.

The bigger question will be what happens when Felix re-enters the Gulf down in the Bay of Campeche. Lots of Mexican oil rigs will be in its path, no doubt...models hint at a slight northerly curvature, with most models taking it into Mexico. Above is a model called a "spaghetti plot", and for good reason. It glops all the various modeling predictions and plots them atop one another, which may (or may not) yield a concensus on what's to happen in the risky future.

Dare I say there are a couple of other areas being 'watched' by the Hurricane Center. One is well east of the Antilles, in an unfavorable area for development...and yet it has hung on to a nicely defined area of convection. Too, off the Georgia coast is an area of low pressure that could have some development as it moves slowly east...away from land, but very close to it at the moment.

On TV last night I watched a little of "The Sound Of Music"...starting to feel like I should sing a new version of the title song:

"The seas are alive,
with the shapes of hurricanes,
And winds they have spun
For a million years...."

Happy Labor Day, everybody! Gotta go get this version to Nashville quickly so Kellie Pickler can get dibs on recording it...