KATIA, JANET AND LABOR DAY

Labor Day weekend is approaching and with it, Tropical Storm–soon-to-be-Hurricane–Katia.

Katia, a derivative of the Greek name Yekaterina, would have been the J-storm this year except for that upstart, short-lived interloper, Jose.

Thus, by the hair of our collective chinny chin chins, did we miss a real-life approximation of the fictional set-up in Eyewall: the J-storm (Janet, in the novel) barreling toward the U.S. on Labor Day weekend.

Katia won’t threaten our shores by this weekend, and may never, but I think she’ll at least do some saber rattling before recurving (turning away from the U.S.) into the vastness of the North Atlantic.

At least that’s what most of the models say she’ll do thanks to a protective upper-air trough and attendant surface cold front pushing off the East Coast. There are, however, a couple of outliers in the model universe that bring Katina uncomfortably close to the Eastern Seaboard next week. So we can’t yet write her off as a “fish storm,” which is what meteorologists call hurricanes that remain exclusively over water.

With her Cape Verde DNA, Katina could easily explode into an extremely dangerous hurricane. Cape Verdes are among the more notorious hurricanes in history, especially those that didn’t recurve or didn’t recurve enough. I offer into evidence Andrew, Hugo and the Great New England Hurricane of 1938–that’s the one that put Providence, R. I., underwater.

So, keep an eye Katia.

And keep an eye, too, on the “backdoor,” the Gulf of Mexico. Some atmospheric turmoil in the northwest Caribbean is trundling toward the southern Gulf, and a few members of the model brotherhood are licking their chops over that eventuality come Labor Day weekend.

So, it’ll be a little hard to rest easy this holiday as the peak of the hurricane season careens toward us.

-August 31, 2011-

Image: A visible shot of Katia, about halfway between Africa and the Lesser Antilles (NOAA image).