Forecasters expect Tropical Storm Sara to cause dangerous flooding in Honduras before making its way into the Gulf of Mexico.
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00:00We do have some time here and all the overall the trend has been that this storm is going to interact with a lot of land in Central America and in Southeast Mexico, but there's still the likelihood of some impacts coming to Florida in about a week, which not expect a repeat of the higher end hurricanes that we had earlier this season.
00:19So here's the current status of the storm. Very heavy rains breaking out over Roatan Barrier Island on the north side of Honduras.
00:25La Ceiba port town there beyond the port of La Ceiba to the west you got San Pedro Sula seeing some rain and into the mountains.
00:32This is the capital city of Tegucigalpa, a very different climate there.
00:35But up in the mountains, we're going to see some very heavy rain. The north facing slopes of Honduras are going to see some inundation of rainfall and Belize is already seeing some heavy rain.
00:44We're going to see rain over the next four days there in Belize and Southeast Mexico.
00:48The problem is this storm is going to slow its forward movement here and you can see a lot of the deep convection on the west side of the storm.
00:54It's moving west at 10 miles per hour. It's westward motion will slow and there's a weak area of high pressure aloft over Cuba.
01:02This is a much stronger one over northwestern Mexico right now, but this weak high pressure system is just enough to kind of gently guide this storm to the southwest and keep it near land.
01:13Kind of pin it near the Honduran coastline and the Honduran coastline there.
01:18So Bree and I were looking at the steering influences here and again, it's not much of a nudge, but it's enough to keep it south and we're going to see some very heavy rain.
01:25The most confident aspect of this forecast is dangerous flooding rain in Honduras that could become a humanitarian disaster.
01:32After a lot of land interaction, we may be dealing with a tropical depression in the name of Sarah northwest of the Yucatan Monday, Tuesday of next week, probably Monday.
01:41And it may accelerate then approaching Florida, but it may be in a very different condition at that time.
01:46Explicitly, our forecast is indicating a tropical depression here hitting Florida.
01:50There's still some wiggle room there, but this is going to be impacted big time by land.
01:55That'll keep its impact down at least for intensity.