And whatever the strength at landfall, and whether or not tropical storm force winds reach Belize, we know for sure there will be rain. How much? Here's Gordon's forecast:
Ronald Gordon, Chief MET Officer
"Precision and details will increase with time. We are still 36 hours out and to be honest with you we know that forecast will never be precise. It will never be precious to the level that people want, in terms of precision and details but just to give you some idea we do know that the extreme north of the country as I said before will be the area that will be most impacted by the winds. Those will decrease rapidly as we move away from that area. For instance in Belize City based on what we are seeing currently we are looking at a windy gusty day with winds to about 15-25 knots late Thursday, Friday due to the system. Orange walk perhaps increases to about 20-30 knots and then further it will be a little higher. And those mostly are in gusts we do in terms of rainfall. We have looked at the latest figures from the modules and they are not too reliable. I'm not rusting them too much. GFS typically referred to as the American Module by some forecasters first is showing minimal rainfall. We are erring on the side of caution knowing that we have a tropical system making landfall to the north of us so we have projected the rain fall to be about 4-6 inches and those can occur in fearder bands which those modules typically don't dissolve very well."
Gordon was unable to specify which of the northern districts will be affected because feeder bands can occur far away from the system.
