What does the 12z data show? Several models have made slight adjustments eastward today, but the most significant movement has come from the UKMET model, produced by the United Kingdom. This is not the world’s best global forecast model, but it is competitive, and something we often look at. In the case of Laura, it has had some of the best performance to date since tracking began a few days. This meant we have weighted it a little bit higher for this storm.
One of the things that has concerned us is that the UKMET, although an outlier, had been frequently bringing Laura to the central or upper Texas coast. This would have placed Houston, Galveston, and the upper Texas coast on the powerful right side of the storm. However, in a just released run of the model, the storm’s landfall location has made a sizable jump east, from near Corpus Christi to the Texas-Louisiana border: