By 00 Z on Sunday the 28th, Georges was maintaining its strength as a Category Two hurricane with winds near 90 knots. The storm's northwesterly motion had slowed to 4 knots and both model guidance and official track forecasts indicated a continued slowing as the eye made landfall. (Click here to see a TRaP calculation description.) While landfall was projected to happen during the morning hours of the 28th, heavy rainfall, storm surge, and hurricane force winds were already battering the Gulf Coast from the western Florida panhandle to eastern Louisiana.

With Georges continuing to slow and the prospect of severe freshwater flooding increasing, the opportunity presents itself to update the TRaP product one more time, some 12 hours before Georges was expected to make landfall along the Mississippi coast. Once the storm makes landfall, rainfall is typically monitored more closely with available NEXRAD radar data and rain gauges.

A 13.5-inch rainfall potential (TRaP) was computed for Georges on this day using 00:22-Z SSM/I rain rates and a storm motion of 4 knots. Any further slowing of Georges would likely result in rainfall totals approaching 20 inches across the storm's path where the more intense rain bands were occurring.