As of 8pm Sunday evening, Tropical Storm Sally was located about 200 miles ESE of the mouth of the Mississippi River. It’s a slow-moving system, and it’s going to slow down even more. Yes, wind speeds will continue to increase and Sally is likely to become a hurricane, but it is this slow forward speed that is going to create some big problems when it comes to storm surge and heavy rainfall for parts of the northern Gulf Coast. The storm should be nearing the coast late Monday night.

The track will still need some fine tuning, but along and just east of where the center comes ashore storm surge could be as high as 11 feet. The areas that especially need to be on guard for this are southeast Louisiana and coastal Mississippi.

On top of this, while water is being pushed in, they’ll be a ton of rain coming down. 8-16″ rainfall totals can be expected, but isolated amounts up to two feet will be possible. Heavy rain will then spread inland across Mississippi, Alabama, north Georgia, Tennessee, and western North Carolina.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic we have Paulette, Rene, and Tropical Depression 20. Paulette will impact Bermuda as a Category 2 storm late tonight. Rene will fizzle out. And TD 20 should become Teddy and strengthen into a major hurricane later this week. As of now, it appears it will stay out to sea.