AKSAR - I agree. It looks like the models did pretty well, all things considered.

That being said, I think that NHC and NOAA will get a little bit of "heat" from politicians. It's bad luck that the state of Florida is long and very narrow. Therefore a "small error" in the predicted ground track places the hurricane on the east coast or the west coast. It's a small error in terms of computational accuracy. But it's a big deal politically, because the authorities are not sure about which big city to evacuate. Evacuation is a super-expensive and difficult process.

It really looks like America needs high-accuracy storm predictions. And that will require much better super computer resources. I am a little surprised that in a major public emergency, NOAA cannot request "backup support" from other agencies with huge supercomputers e.g. the Energy Labs and the intelligence agencies. Other gov departments have huge computer resources. Someone in the GOV needs to look at re-assigning computer resources based on national emergency needs.