I know: it's a terrible name for such a destructive force. Ironically it made a similar run on the islands in 2007.
The storm is right on the edge of "hurricane" but it's been intensifying during the day and cooling off at night. It'll start raining at Hilo tonight and the center of the storm should make landfall on Monday. Its track is a little unusual for being so far north-- instead of approaching from southeast of the islands and then recurving with an uppercut, it's coming straight in from the east. It's expected to lose most of its energy over the Big Island and Maui from the atmosphere's high-pressure shear (which usually protects the islands while giving us our tradewinds) and the landmasses. Even so the forecast is 15" of rain on those two islands, followed by 6"-10" on Oahu. For once Kauai looks like they'll catch a break.
We've gone through our hurricane checklist, although the worst we expect is sustained winds of 60 MPH and maybe a few higher gusts. We'll probably lose power on Monday or Tuesday and have it back by Wednesday. Our daughter finished her Navy midshipman summer training last Friday and she won't fly back to college until Wednesday, so we have plenty of help for the disaster readiness & recovery. I hope that at worst this is just a good warm-up drill for the rest of the season.
I have the blog loaded up for the coming week, and the server is on the Mainland. It should blunder on in autopilot (without my moderating of comments or spam) until I'm back online.
I think after Flossie dissipates there'll be a petition for NWS to replace that name with a better F-word...
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/cphc/http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/cpac/flash-vis.html (this GOES looper takes a while to load up)
http://www.khon2.com/2013/07/28/central-pacific-hurricane-center-press-conference-for-current-ts-flossie-status/