KATRINA – Day Four.
Early on Friday morning, August 26, 2005, Tropical Storm Katrina was completing her short traversal of the southern end of the Florida Peninsula and emerging over the Gulf of Mexico. The storm briefly weakened from hurricane strength to tropical storm intensity for just a few hours. Moving just south of due west, Katrina emerged into the Gulf of Mexico about 3 a.m. EDT.
Within four hours, the storm had regained hurricane strength and entered a period of rapid deepening. The morning forecast package indicated that the hurricane would turn northwest and then north, making a second landfall near Panama City, Florida in about 72 hours. A trough of low pressure over the Plains states was expected to move southeastward, eroding the ridge of high pressure over the northern Gulf Coast that was steering the storm on a westerly course. The resulting weakness was expected to allow the hurricane to turn to the north.
Through the day, the hurricane’s central pressure dropped from 987 millibars to 965 millibars by late afternoon and top winds increased to 100 mph. The late afternoon forecast package shifted the official track 150 miles to the west, with a projected landfall just west of Mobile, Alabama. Forecasters cautioned that the track was still very uncertain, and that the models were actually beginning to agree on an even more westerly landfall in southeastern Louisiana.
All of the guidance was predicting that Katrina would become a major hurricane before landfall, with the official forecast calling for Katrina to intensify into a Category Four hurricane.
People along the Gulf Coast fell into a nervous sleep that Friday night.
