Ike is a big storm:

[phantom power]

[Virginia Dare]

1. Looks a lot like Katrina in terms of size..

The pressure is 945 in that graphic, is it falling? Katrina went down to 902 just before it hit, does anybody remember what Kat's pressure was 36 hours before landfall?

[phantom power]

2. More or less stable for now...

Based on that pressure, they expect it to develop cat-3 winds soon. Ike is not likely to achieve a cat-5. Jeff Masters noted yesterday that it does have the potential to become the most damaging storm in Texas history, due to the height and breadth of the storm-surge it could produce. The worst possible case is very bad, but everything has to go wrong in a certain alignment for that to happen.

[happyslug]

6. NOAA on Katrina said 36 hours before it hit 902, Katrina was at 950

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/2005atlan.shtml
Date-Time Pressure
27 / 0000 959
27 / 0600 950
27 / 1200 942
27 / 1800 948
28 / 0000 941
28 / 0600 930
28 / 1200 909
28 / 1800 902
29 / 0000 905
29 / 0600 913
29 / 1200 923
Appendix to the above report of Katrina, I used he MS Word version to copy the data (And removed he Longitude and Latitude) but same report is in the PDF format.

[hunter]

3. They are such pretty and elegant things...

... it's a shame they are so deadly.

[phantom power]

4. It's not just big, it's strange:

Hurricane Ike's winds remain at Category 2 strength, but Ike is a freak storm with extreme destructive storm surge potential. Ike's pressure fell rapidly last night to 944 mb, but the hurricane did not respond to the pressure change by increasing its maximum winds in the eyewall. Instead, Ike responded by increasing the velocity of its winds away from the eyewall, over a huge stretch of the Gulf of Mexico. Another very unusual feature of Ike is the fact that the surface winds are much slower than the winds being measured aloft by the Hurricane Hunters. Winds at the surface may only be at Category 1 strength, even though Ike has a central pressure characteristic of a Category 3 or 4 storm. This very unusual structure makes forecasting the future intensity of Ike nearly impossible. The possibilities range from a Category 1 storm at landfall--as predicted by the HWRF model--to a Category 4 storm at landfall, as predicted by the GFDL.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1080&tstamp=200809

[GliderGuider]

5. Ike is larger than Katrina now

Ike's storm surge could be the big deal:

Ike is now larger than Katrina was, both in its radius of tropical storm force winds--275 miles--and in it radius of hurricane force winds--115 miles. For comparison, Katrina's tropical storm and hurricane force winds extended out 230 and 105 miles, respectively. Ike's huge wind field has put an extraordinarily large volume of ocean water in motion. When this swirling column of water hits the shallow waters of the Continental Shelf, it will be be forced up into a large storm surge which will probably rival the massive storm surge of Hurricane Carla of 1961. (snip) The latest experimental storm surge forecast From NOAA's SLOSH model (Figure 1) shows a 10% chance that Ike's storm surge will exceed 15-21 feet at Galveston. The Galveston sea wall is 17 feet high, so it may get overtopped.