Stratosphere747 wrote:soonertwister wrote:gtalum wrote:She is ever so slowly wobbling her way
NW right along the NHC track. Almost like she's stalled. Hmmm, where have we heard predictions of a stall?
So much for the relevance of this thread.

It that based upon two or three wobble movements of this storm, or over six or more hours of observation?
Let's see if you can say the same thing six or twelve hours from now. I have a hunch that you will be wrong.
In fact, I'll predict that 12 hours from now Wilma will not have any eyewall winds on the Yucatan.
So much for the relevance of my post.
Sooner...
If I could come into this discussion..

The consensus of this board for the most part has been doing almost everything possible to argue against the track of the NHC. I'll chalk it up to plain concern for their areas, and respectfully they have every right to ask questions.
The simple fact is that the track is almost dead on to what the NHC has predicted in the short term.
Scott
NHC's track forecast from 4PM CDT today had Wilma exiting the northeastern tip of Yucatan near midnight tomorrow. That's more than 24 hours from now. You can defend NHC all you want on track confidence, but they have consistently stated that they had low confidence in their own track and timing based upon divergence of the models that they use to background their predictions.
Nothing they have done is wrong. They basically said they wouldn't be surprised if their forecast was wrong. Now it appears it will be wrong. Please don't give me satellite pics of the last 1-1/2 hours to support any kind of theorem about the track of this storm. The western side is being sheared away, which means all of the potency of this storm will be over the water.
I'm no god, I can't make the earth and sun move. But I can deal with what my eyes and brain tell me. I don't have great confidence in their track speed and short-term forecast for Wilma. NHC wouldn't have been embarrassed to say the same, they've been telling us all along.
Let's wait a few hours before we grant sainthood to the track that NHC said was quite possibly wrong. It may have actually been wrong. And that would not be surprising to me, nor to them.
Go to the NHC archive and look at the track forecast history. It's been very good overall as usual. But in the short term it's been around average for them for recent years, which makes them light-years ahead of any other source for confidence on track.
I still think that Wilma will not spend anywhere near 30 hours over land.
I will say that one thing that I find very irritating about their track forecasts is how they change the format from one to the next. They move the legend randomly from this corner to that, the scale from one to another, they move the central focus of the track by hundreds of miles when the hurricane has moved 60.
That tells me that they feel confortable in an environment of radical change, which doesn't make me appreciate what they are doing.