Tropical Storm Isaac developed in the area around Cuba and the Dominican Republic. At that time, it was a tropical depression, however only for a short time. It slowly formed into the hurricane it is today(8/28/12)but I'll get in to that in just a little bit. It first hit Cuba then the Dominican Republic and Haiti; where they still hadn't gotten back on their feet after the storm in 2010. It was a weak tropical storm at that time but the winds were still pretty strong; 65 miles per hour.
Once it got past those countries, Tropical Storm Isaac was projected to head towards the Key West area of Florida, then was supposed to fizzle out to a tropical depression. Well I can safely say that never happened. The meteorologists were wrong when the projected path came out.they call them the spaghetti plots or the spaghetti models. When the models came out the next day they showed the storm moving towards the Alabama/Mississippi area, the models continued to shift over the next couple days, not even touching Alabama. The models continued to change over the next several days eventually landing on the state of Louisiana(where I live). Tropical Storm Isaac took at least a week to make it into the Gulf of Mexico and also took forever to in to a hurricane.
Tropical Storm Isaac was moving around 14 miles per hour in the Gulf of Mexico, granted that sounds fairly fast, which it is, it still took a while for it to get to Louisiana. Isaac kept slowing down then gaining speed then slowing back down and so on and so forth. The reason for that was because the drier air in the Gulf. The Gulf waters were hot enough for Isaac to gain strength but since there was all that dry air it was unable to do so.
On August 25, 2012, my father in law called me to ask if we were going to evacuate or not and if we were he would get us a hotel to keep us safe and away from harms way.
Larson talks about the history of hurricanes, and also gives us a meteorological lesson on how hurricanes form. ... In fact, they saw a hurricane as poetry (107). ... If Simmons was right, Galveston lay directly in the path of the storm, and Simmons was powerless to sound any kind of alarm whatsoever (139). ... Joseph Cline, Isaac's brother, did not trust it however. ... "Stay,"" Isaac insisted (172). ...