Hurricane Sandy Chooses a More Westerly Path

Hurricane Sandy strengthened overnight Wednesday into Thursday, and also defined direction. It appears as of the 8:00 am briefing on Thursday that the storm will stay off-shore, but create a rain event for the eastern part of North Carolina. National Weather Service Meteorologist Gail Hartfield:

“Sandy, well overnight deepened quite rapidly, and then really intensified and is now a Category 1 or a borderline Category 2 hurricane.”
 

The effects of the storm on the eastern part of the state are still a few days away according to Hartfield:

“Expectations are that the actual center is going to be passing off-shore of North Carolina between the North Carolina coast and Bermuda, sometime very late Saturday night through Monday, basically. It’s going to be moving a little more slowly at that point.”

At this early stage of the game, a definitive prediction is still unclear;

“It’s still up in the air, literally, as far as how much wind we’ll see; liable to see some northerly winds 10 to 20 miles per hour, and you could see some gusts a little over that, mainly a long and east of I-95. And of course we do have some expectations of some heavy rain in that corridor roughly from I-95 eastward, and of course the closer you get to the coast the worse conditions are going to get.”
 

National Weather Service Meteorologist Gail Hartfield.