WASHINGTON (AP) – In what might eventually be more a psychological blow than a meteorological one, there’s a decent chance that Hurricane Matthew could loop back full circle for a second, unwelcome visit to South Florida next week, meteorologists says.
If so, what arrives Tuesday would just be a weakened remnant of the monster storm that’s about to rake the Florida and Georgia coasts. It’s more akin to rubbing salt in the Sunshine State’s wounds than inflicting further damage, meteorologists say. It would be unusual, but not unprecedented.
It is still a long way out, but some computer models show that after raking the lower southeast coast, Matthew will turn east into in the Atlantic and then back down south again. This many days out, any model forecast is subject to major changes and shouldn’t be relied upon, meteorologists caution. Still, the National Hurricane Center’s five-day forecast shows a now-tropical storm Matthew making three quarters of the loop by Tuesday morning.
One of the two major computer models that meteorologists use on – the American GFS model – has Matthew doing a full circle and crossing into South Florida sometime Tuesday. The other one, the European model, doesn’t quite complete the circle, says Jeff Masters, a former federal hurricane hunter meteorologist and meteorology director of Weather Underground.
Masters puts the odds of a full loop-de-loop at 50-50, but it is getting more probable.