Where does Rita go now? 2:00 p.m., SAT

Craig here...

First, the good news. Rita is now only a tropical storm with 65 mph winds. Even better news, she's still moving to the North at 12 mph. When I went to sleep last night my fear was that I would wake up and see what I had forecasted, Rita stalling out in East Texas and beginning to dump heavy rain. She's still producing flooding rains, but she's moving. That's the best news.

Now the question becomes, where does she go from here? Well, we've talked a lot lately about computer models, so let's not stop now. The latest models now take Rita through central Arkansas and into Mississippi by Monday. After that, well, things go in different directions.

Some dissipate the storm completely, which is the best case scenario. Others try to turn Rita into another Ivan. They take the storm back South and Southwest into the Gulf of Mexico. Regenerate her as a Tropical Storm, and then she makes another landfall in the Coastal Bend or Rio Grande Valley. I personally find this scenario very unlikely, but possible. (Man, that's a statement to cover my tail in case it happens.) The reason I say it's unlikely is this, all week the models had a hard time deciding what to do with Rita once she made landfall, but for a time, consistently, they took into the Ark-La-Tex region, then bounced her back toward Central and West Texas. Obviously, that is not going to happen now. Then the models took her into the Ark-La-Tex region, and bounched her back towards the Houston-Galveston area. Again, appears that is not going to happen because Rita is continuing to move at 12 mph. So now, do you really trust these computer models in the long term when they try to turn this system back out into the Gulf of Mexico and make her back into a Tropical Storm again? No way, not yet. For this forecaster I'm going to need to see this storm at least start to make a turn Monday-Tuesday to the South before I'll buy into that theory.

Then again, stranger things can and do happen with weather everyday, and that's why I love my job so much.

Back to our weather for a moment. With Rita continuing her speed and eventual turn to the east, it looks like our afternoon highs will be a tad higher than I forecasted Friday. I was calling for 90-91 this weekend, but we're going to have to bump those numbers up to 95-97 for Saturday-Sunday. I was hoping for more cloud cover from Rita but that's just not going to happen.

A cold front still looks very good to arrive into the Big Country Wednesday night. If all goes as planned, we should see at least a couple of mornings with lows into the upper 50s and afternoons with highs only in the lower 80s.