The winds are definitely kicking up and become more sustained. So far, the rain has not been that bad. We’ve had showers throughout the morning. There are have been some heavy showers, but those have not lasted more than a few minutes.

I woke up this morning to some strong wind and rain, but that was just a feeder-band moving through, and things are somewhat quiet again now.

Here’s an update for those of you wondering what things are like here in Tampa right now. So far all is fairly quiet. We had one squall line come through about 2:oopm. The wind kicked up a bit, and there was a very brief shower of rain.

As expected, NOAA has now moved the storm track back to the north. I’m guessing we’ll start seeing the effects of the storm Saturday evening, and should be cleared out of here by Sunday afternoon.

There were a lot of changes with Frances during the night. Sustained winds dropped to 120mph (making it a category 2 hurricane), and the eye became less organized.

It appears the Hi pressure system isn’t weakening, so the 11am storm track posted by the Hurricane Tracking Center has the center line shifted west some. This brings the storm closer to Tampa.

Here’s what’s going on at 8:00am Thursday in Tampa relative to Hurricane Frances

With large parts of Florida still trying to recover from Hurricane Charley, we now have to be worried about Frances. Frances is now skirting the eastern most islands of the Bahama s, and is most definitely headed this way with a huge wind mass nearly twice as large as Charley. Frances is packing sustained winds of 140 miles per hour, and may increase to a category 5 Hurricane by landfall Friday.