Tropical Storm Isaias has formed in the Bay of Campeche, and southeastern Louisiana remains in the storm's cone of uncertainty.
As of 4 a.m. Wednesday, the storm's center of circulation is located about 285 miles west of Progreso, Mexico, and about 580 miles southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River and moving east-northeast at eight miles-per-hour.
"Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 40 mph (65 km/h) with higher gusts," the National Hurricane Center's forecasters said in their 4 a.m. update. "Rapid strengthening is forecast over the next day or two, and Isaias is expected to become a hurricane by Thursday."
The current track predicts Isaias will make landfall as a Category 1 hurricane near the Alabama/Florida State Line late Friday night or early Saturday morning. However, the National Hurricane Center urges Gulf Coast residents not to put much faith in the current forecast track.
" . . . (T)here remains quite a bit of along and across-track spread in the track guidance, with the AI-model guidance remaining on the east side, and physics-based models on the west side of the guidance envelope," the NHC forecast discussion reads. "The NHC track forecast continues to favor more of the eastward solutions, but not quite as far east as the latest HFIP Corrected Consensus Approach (HCCA) or Google DeepMind ensemble mean (GDMI). This latest track is a eastward shift compared to the previous forecast, but given large amount of across- and along-track spread users should continue to monitor forecast updates given the below-average track confidence."
This is a developing story.
