Francine weakens to tropical storm: The latest with 3News' Matt Wintz

Scene has been downgraded to a tropical storm after making landfall as a category two hurricane in southern Louisiana. According to the National Hurricane center, it made landfall in the parish of Terrebonne with winds around 100 MPH. A state of emergency has been declared in Louisiana and also in Mississippi, let's bring in Matt Winz. He's been keeping an eye on Francina. Matt. Where does the storm go from here? Yeah. Well, it's heading northward. Uh, Denita, but the good news is it's starting to weaken a little bit. So it's really fallen apart since yesterday. This is yesterday afternoon, five o'clock, as you mentioned, category two as it came inland. Well, circulating center there, you could see the eye wall even came in and then the whole thing kind of spreads out once it hits land, that friction takes a hold of it and it just kind of frays itself out and it just produces a lot of rainfall and the winds start to come down. And so as right now that center circulation heading up through areas of southern Mississippi, it'll eventually get to northern Mississippi and western Alabama later on this afternoon. But you notice the moisture with this, it's all north loaded, everything on the north and the east side of this. There's nothing on the southern end that tells you dry air is starting to come in as well. And any time a hurricane hits land, it does start to weaken a little bit but still some heavy rain and a flood threat for Mississippi and then eventually getting up into Alabama and Tennessee. So latest on Francine right now, tropical storm 45 mile per hour winds still moving northeast at 12. That's pretty good movement for a tropical system, but that movement is really going to start to slow over the next couple of days. In fact, by tomorrow, it barely moves up towards Memphis. You may be able to walk or run faster than that and that slow movement is going to cause those flooding issues for areas down towards the south. But for us, we've got this really strong pressure. It's been providing this beautiful weather. So typically if we didn't have the high, all this moisture would come up into the Ohio Valley. But it does not. You see, as we go through Friday into Friday night, this system stays well south of us. And in terms of rainfall, that's where all the rain's gonna be as well south of us. We do need the rainfall. We'll talk about some rain in the forecast coming up in just a little bit. Denita. Yeah, the grass needs some rain right now. Sure, sure does. All right, thank you, Matt.

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