Lowell’s forecast shifts a bit east, tropical storm warnings issued for Kauai County

Sep 06, 2026

Busy day again for me today, but I want to bring you up to date on a couple of situations. First, the National Weather Service suffered another nationwide communications failure on Saturday afternoon that seems similar to the one the agency had in early August that resulted in weather warnings not being properly disseminated during a severe weather outbreak. The outage appears to have started around 1 pm CT, and lasted for more than 90 minutes — communications were restored before 3 pm CT.

Luckily this outage occurred in a not quite as active weather situation, although there were certainly strong to severe thunderstorms in parts of the South, particularly in North Carolina and eastern Tennessee where there were numerous reports of severe weather on Saturday. Areas of eastern Texas and southwest Louisiana were also dealing with strong storms as well as heavy rainfall after the serious flash flooding from Edouard last week. A local television station in southeast Texas reported on the NWS outage:

In a public service announcement posted at 1:54 p.m., Donald Jones with the National Weather Service office in Lake Charles said the office and other locations “appear to have suffered a large-scale communications outage” and are “presently unable to disseminate warnings or any other weather product.”

“Should the need for a warning arise, we will communicate it here as well as through our social media pages,” Jones said. “We will also attempt to notify emergency responders directly.”

Needless to say, this episode is just another incident in the ongoing concerns with IT and communications infrastructure that I and others have been reporting on and which I discussed again in Thursday’s newsletter.

The other big story I want to talk about today is the latest with Hurricane Lowell. Lowell has been going through periods of varying organization in the last 36 hours, and after some weakening appears to be now on a bit of an upswing. The satellite appearance has improved a bit and a USAF reconnaissance aircraft in the hurricane currently has found that pressure has been falling and is back down to around 943 mb. NHC estimates that Lowell remains a major hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph.

The hurricane has made its long anticipated turn to the north, and actually seems to have been moving a bit to the right of the anticipated forecast. As a result, the model forecasts have been shifting somewhat to the right, and the most recent Google DeepMind AI forecast is now a bit closer to Kauai County.

Lowell is a large hurricane, and even though it will be weakening Monday into Tuesday as it moves north/northeast, it will have a large footprint of impacts and the farther east it tracks the greater the potential impacts will be in the populated main Hawaiian Islands. NHC has issued tropical storm warnings for Kauai County (Kauai and Niihau islands), with tropical storm conditions expected starting Monday afternoon. Heavy rainfall and large swells, rip currents and coastal flooding are anticipated in other parts of the islands as noted in the NHC Key Messages above.

I will be traveling the next couple of days but will also have opportunities to monitor Lowell, and will provide some updates via Substack Notes and Chat (paid subscriber benefit) and social media as I can.