There is still plenty of air pressure north of "Dean" to keep it on course. However, I will say this...

...crossing land will diminish it's punch as it enters the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan will receive a beating for the time it passes over the peninsula. The question is what will happen once "Dean" reenters water. With warmer waters it might accelerate again and then open water will allow it to expand it's diameter again. I want to say the system as it exists now will hold and "Dean" will cross over Central Mexico which will be devastating for those people. But, in all honesty, the air masse keeping "Dean" on it's current path is moving inland and with "Dean" reentering the Gulf; I think there is a margin of error I don't feel comfortable with to say for sure it won't move more north. It might.

There were deaths in the USA due to flooding in Minnesota and a lot of suffering in the middle of the nation due to "Erin." The NY Times has it on it's e-front page:

Floods Kill 13 in Midwest (click here)

Floods soaked much of the midsection of the country from Texas to Minnesota today, causing at least 13 deaths as swirling waters washed out roads, triggered mudslides and forced evacuations of low-lying areas.

It is hard to accept this tragedy of a country that could have prevented this while it argues over oil right under melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. This isn't the USA I grew up in, it's foreign to me. There is no reason for these tragedies and Americans should be outraged in the year 2007 this is our reality.

My concern is the unpredictable nature of these systems and the 'split second' a difference in course could make. I would be taking all possibilities seriously.

This storm is serious and absolutely deadly. The storm surge will be significant and the winds are killers. Mexico and Central American will need help when this is over. Please take this seriously. The deaths to impoverished countries can be so terrible. They need to move inland and upland. Higher elevations are better than low and inland better than near shore. This storm is bigger than anyone can survive.

DO NOT RISK YOUR LIVES.

DO NOT RISK YOUR LIVES.

DO NOT RISK YOUR LIVES.

This is a national shame. This fire in Montana was huge and no efforts were exerted to prevent it or bring it under control.

These are not 'naturally' occurring clouds the astronauts took while in orbit. They are wildfires out of control on terra firma in Idaho and Montana. The USA can't do anything about those fires? With the right leadership and enough personnel it is amazing what can be done including research and prevention. The USA doesn't make those investments anymore because tax cuts dominate the political priorities of the nation. Shame on anyone that sacrifices the stewardship of Earth over personal wealth.

Anyone want a good paying job working for the National Forestry Service to save our nation's trees? Then make a difference for Earth next time you vote !

On August 13, 2007, while docked to the International Space Station (ISS), the crew members of Shuttle Mission STS-118 and ISS Expedition 15 reported seeing the smoke plumes from wide-spread fires across Idaho and Montana. The crew photographed and downlinked images of isolated plumes (top image) and regional views of the smoke (bottom image) from different perspectives. Strong westerly winds were driving the smoke eastward....

The Gulf vortex acted as a road block to Hurricane "Dean" (click here for 12 hour loop)

August 20, 2007
1217
Tropical Atlantic Satellite

The high pressure behind "Dean" has gone to higher latitudes but still remains in the Atlantic with questionable dissipation. There is another low pressure east of the Antilles, but the 'heat concentration' that occurred resulting in "Dean" looks fairly well resolved for now. That's what hurricanes do; they remove heat from the troposphere and drive it into the oceans. It makes our Earth a place where life occurs.

There is still a lot of weather turbulence at the Canadian-American border. Let's hope the percipitation from "Dean" doesn't come north into the middle of North America making the current flooding worse.

August 20, 2007
1330z
UNISYS Water Vapor Satellite GOES East


The rain bands accompanying this storm reach to a large diameter. The Gulf vortex more easily viewed in the 12 hour loop acted to push "Dean" south into a rotation in the Carribean Sea. It is prudent to maintain a watch over the direction of "Dean" as the Gulf vortex moves inland. The volume of rain accompanying this storm and the land falling storm surge (the word surge was mine in this context before it was ever Bush's) should be a continued concern for all the Gulf area. With luck, the path of the hurricane won't change and New Orleans will be spared any deluge of water in any way it might come. The attention by the media of this storm has been welcome and more than prudent.

When wondering where all the water comes from and why it doesn't go away, consider this:

Arctic sea ice melted at an unprecedented rate during the summer of 2007. Much of the melting occurred in the East Siberian Sea. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured part of that region on June 15 and July 27, 2007. These images show a portion of the coast of eastern Siberia and the New Siberian Islands, roughly 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northwest of Alaska. Despite some cloud cover, the images show pronounced sea ice retreat over a period of 42 days.

There goes the North Pole (click here)
Sunday, August 19, 2007 8:10 PM MDT
Colorado Daily Staff ReportUniversity of Colorado at Boulder researchers are now forecasting a 92 percent chance that the 2007 September minimum extent of sea ice across the Arctic region will set an all-time record low.The researchers, who forecast in April a 33 percent chance the September minimum of sea ice would set a new record, dramatically revised their prediction following a rapid disintegration of sea ice during July, said Research Associate Sheldon Drobot of CU-Boulder's Colorado Center for Astrodynamics.“During the first week in July, the Arctic sea ice started to disappear at rates we had never seen before,” said Drobot, who leads CCAR's Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group in CU-Boulder's aerospace engineering sciences department....

England under water: scientists confirm global warming link to increased rain (click here)
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 23 July 2007
It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time ­ an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.
The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.
The "major rainfall event" of last Friday ­ fully predicted as such by the Met Office ­ has given the country a quite exceptional battering, with the Thames still rising. In Gloucester water levels had reached 34 feet, just 12 inches below flood defences ­ the same level as during the flood of 1947 ­ although a police spokesman said last night that the River Severn had stopped rising.
Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.
About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.
Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.
The Great Flood of July is all the more remarkable for following right on from the Great Flood of June, which caused similar havoc in northern towns such as Doncaster and Hull, after a similar series of astonishingly torrential downpours on 24 June.
Meteorologists agree that the miserably wet British summer of 2007 has generally been caused by a southward shift towards Britain of the jetstream, the high-level airflow that brings depressions eastwards across the Atlantic. This is fairly normal. But debate is going on about whether climate change may be responsible for the intensity of the two freak rainfall episodes, which have caused flooding the like of which has never been seen in many places.
This is because the computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed, "extreme rainfall events", as one of its principal consequences.
The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.
But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, and its details are under embargo and cannot be reported until then. But its main findings have caused a stir, and are being freely discussed by climate scientists in the Met Office, the Hadley Centre and the Department for Environment For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns ­ the increases in rainfall ­ observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.
"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause ­ climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.
"Some people would argue that you can't take a single event and pin that on climate change, but what happened in Britain last Friday fits quite easily with these conclusions. It does seem to have a certain resonance with what they're finding in this research."
The Hadley Centre lead scientist involved with the study was Dr Peter Stott, who specialises in finding "human fingerprints" ­ sometimes referred to as anthropogenic signals ­ on the changing climate.
Last September Dr Stott, who was not available for comment yesterday, published research showing that the climate of central England had warmed by a full degree Celsius in the past 40 years, and that this could be directly linked to human causes ­ the first time that man-made climate change had been identified at such a local level.
The human fingerprint is detected by making computer simulations of the recent past climate, with and without emissions of greenhouse gases ­ and then comparing the results with what has actually been observed in the real world.
In Dr Stott's research, and in the study to be published on Wednesday, the observed rises in temperature and rainfall could be clearly accounted for by the scenario in which emissions were prominent.
The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model.
Global warming is likely to lead to higher rainfall because a warming atmosphere contains more water vapour and more energy. Since climate prediction began 20 years ago, heavier rainfall over Britain has been a consistent theme.

The weather at Glacier Bay National Park (Crystal Wind Chime) is:

Elevation :: 33 ft / 10 m

Temperatures :: 54 °F / 12 °C

Conditions :: Overcast

Humidity :: 77%

Dew Point :: 46 °F / 8 °C

Wind :: Calm

Pressure :: 29.85 in / 1011 hPa (Falling)

Visibility :: 10.0 miles / 16.1 kilometers

UV:
0 out of 16
Clouds:
Mostly Cloudy 3600 ft / 1097 m Overcast 4400 ft / 1341 m
(Above Ground Level)