Pine Island Weather Blog

Our apologies for the recent outages and loss of the west facing webcam. We’ve been doing an office renovation and as a result equipment has been moving around from time to time causing some issues with the site and frequently with data uploads. This process is ongoing and it will not be unusual to see some downtime and loss of data over the next few months.

It looks like we may have lost the west facing camera due to a hardware failure. We’ll be troubleshooting it later to confirm but for now we’re assuming the camera itself has failed and will have to be replaced. That may take a while given the ongoing office renovation noted above.

UPDATE: The west facing camera is back online. Turns out it was a cable issue.

We’ve finaally gotten around to updating the station information page to reflect the new PC hardware we are using. Additionally, we’ve tweaked the time lapse so that it only generates images during daylight hours. This makes the movie file much smaller and eliminates the first few minutes of looking at nothing but blackness and the one light across the canal.

We are aware that you may be experiencing some intermittant issues loading pages on the site and we are working with our hosting company to get them resolved. They acknowledge that this is an issue on their end and they are working it.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE 11/22/2009: It appears the hosting company has resolved this issue at this time.

We don’t have quite enough time for a lengthy update this morning, but watching the satellite imagery it seems obvious that the anticipated destruction of Ida by its interaction with other systems is underway. The NHC is hedging its bet and saying that Ida may still be a hurricane when it makes landfall, but I’m betting against that.

Current forecast track has us well out of the picture so Ida should be a non-event for us.

Ida has regained hurricane strength and given its current forward speed should bein the Gulf of Mexico late this afternoon or early this evening. The track forecast seems to be pretty solid for the next 48 hours but after that there is a lot of uncertainty due to a system moving across the US that will reak havoc on Ida. Timing will be everything in figuring out where Ida eventually goes.

The good news is that this same system should also rip Ida apart, turning it into an extra-tropical system as the two interact. While Ida has the potential for some more strengthening in the near term, that situation will change rapidly as the frontal system approaches and shears Ida apart. There is still potential for Ida to ultimately come ashore in our area but if it does it should no longer be a tropical system at that point.

Hurricane Ida Forecast Track - 11/08/09 6:00AM