[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Tropical Storm Karen has formed in the Gulf of Mexico, and is expected to hit somewhere along the northern Gulf coast this weekend. Hurricane Watches are up from Louisiana to Florida. The computer models are split on Karen’s likely landfall location, as you can see above: those are the Canadian model (left), the European model (center) and the American GFS model (right), via @RyanMaue. The models agree, however, that Karen won’t get stronger than a Category 1 hurricane, and many models doubt she’ll ever graduate from tropical storm status. So this isn’t looking like a HELLSTORM OF DEATH worth hyping (not that that’ll stop Drudge & the cable newsies), but it certainly bears watching, and should be taken seriously by folks in the potentially affected areas. The storm is only ~2 days away, so the time to begin prudent preparations is now.

In order to avoid the massive time sink and brain damage of the ongoing government-shutdown #DERPNADO, and for other personal reasons, I’m on Twitter #hiatus at the moment, posting only the occasional Instagram and Tumblr link (totaling 2.5 tweets per day, vs. my normal pace of 100+ tweets per day). However, my #hiatus rules said, “If there’s a hurricane threat to the U.S., I’ll return temporarily to Twitter for my Pajamas Media blog’s sake.” I will do that later tonight, and will remain on Twitter through the weekend to track Karen – though I will attempt to adhere to the Jakes Compromise, which has also been endorsed, crucially, by the Official Wife of the Weather Nerd, @MileHighBecky.

In the mean time, here’s a reading list of weather-bloggers and tweeters who you should consider checking out.

P.S. A portion of this update will be cross-posted on Weather Nerd.