Disorganized Bertha Charging Toward Texas on Its Last Day

Bertha is stretched out and ugly, but the National Hurricane Center is still classifying it as a tropical storm. It's an unconventional storm, for sure. The center of circulation at the surface of the earth is tracking over southwestern Louisiana, but the worst weather is associated with a center of rotation higher in the atmosphere a couple hundred miles farther southwest.

In a well-developed storm, the circulations are stacked on top of one another as you go up in the atmosphere. But strong upper-level winds have tilted the storm over and pushed the mid-level center well out into the Gulf.

Still, winds at the ground are gusting 30 to 50 mph along the Gulf Coast, and the tides are higher than normal – 2 to 3 feet above normal high tide in some areas to the east of the center.

It's unclear if the low-level center – the circulation center we track to locate the storm – will survive until the whole complex moves into Texas later today, but regardless of the technical meteorological structure, low-end tropical storm conditions are likely in some areas.

The National Hurricane Center has a tropical storm warning in effect from Sargent, Texas, just south of Houston/Galveston, north and east into Louisiana. Boaters and people with vulnerable properties should take common-sense precautions.

Most of the heavier rain should move into the southern part of Texas, parts of which have been in a drought, so this could be beneficial. But gusty squalls will be possible everywhere along the coast and pushing inland this evening.

We'll be done with Bertha by tomorrow, though its remnant will continue across south Texas.

Nothing else appears to be in the offing in the Atlantic for the foreseeable future.