At least the worst of Dorian has missed Puerto Rico but it is still pounding the Virgin Islands with the Bahamas up next.

My weekend will have plenty of weather watching and football watching.

If you haven’t read my previous blogs on Dorian please do, as I can not repeat every key point with every update or the blogs will turn into War and Peace so it helps to follow along, you miss a Tweet or a blog you miss a lot.

One key worth repeating is NOT to get hung-up on any one model or any specific forecast at this still early juncture vis-a-vis impact on the U.S. We may have to wait until Friday before things firm-up.

Bottom line is that higher than normal uncertainty continues regarding the future strength (intensity) and track path of Dorian.

The broad window is still from North Carolina to Louisiana, within that Florida is currently the main target (all of the state but mainly Central and South). But tomorrow it could be somewhere else.

Also, somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico Coast is a secondary target TX-FL but that could change.

Anywhere in GEORGIA is NOT out of the woods just because of the longer term uncertainty.

But FOR NOW the worst impacts look to be away from Metro Atlanta.

NOTE that MOST of the impact looks to stay on or off of coastal areas through the end of Labor Day (outside of Florida):

ESTIMATED RAINFALL 8PM SATURDAY THROUGH 8PM MONDAY:

ESTIMATED RAINFALL 8PM MONDAY THROUGH 8PM WEDNESDAY:

The operational/deterministic version of the ECMWF model is the farthest South than any other model:

(Maps from Tomer Burg)

But the ECMWF and it’s ensembles are just one of a hundred models and is different from what it showed previously, underscoring that we are still struggling to resolve the many synoptic features in the atmosphere that will steer the storm resulting in a LOW CONFIDENCE outlook at this time.

Shift left and South from earlier cones:

So still plenty of questions about where Dorian will hit land in the U.S., what day and time it will and how intense it’ll be when it does, let alone what happens beyond that and for how long its remnants will be a problem.

In the Euro Ensembles Tomer points out there is a clustering of two groups in the spaghetti plots:

So we can not discount a double hit with a major hurricane impacting the Sunshine State and emerging somewhere in the Gulf after crossing the peninsula for a second hit of unknown strength, but with bathtub warm water in Gulf possibly strong.

To see just how much uncertainty there is beyond day 3, each ‘L’ on this map shows where the 51 different ECMWF ensemble members puts the center of Dorian Tuesday morning. Clearly a tremendous spread in options, thus underscoring the need to not take any one outcome literally:

Ignore the Ls in the lower left, that is a different system.

Here is a nice dumbed-down primer from weathermodels if all this has your head spinning:

Here’s me looking at the unusually high spread of model solutions from one run to the next (beverage may vary):

For more follow me on Twitter @MellishMeterWSB.