7:56 PM EDT: Hurricane Ike’s eye is now fully visible on short-range Houston radar. It’s strengthening, too: Ike has an eye now, and that eye is contracting. Winds are up to 110 mph. Ike’s odds of attaining Category 3 status have increased — though the media is still overemphasizing this point. It’s the surge that matters, not the category.

And the surge is continuing to roll in: at the entrance to Galveston Bay, the tide should be going out, but instead the water level is still rising, now above nine feet. By the time we get to “low tide,” it may be at 10 feet. And then the tide will start to come in — and with it, the heart of Ike’s storm surge. Remember, we’re still 6+ hours away from landfall!

I think the general public, nationwide, is going to be stunned and confused when a “Category 2″ or “weak Category 3″ hurricane causes the sort of catastrophic damage that Ike is going to cause. I just saw, on my muted TV, Bill O’Reilly promoting a segment called “Hurricane Hype.” Huh?? That might have been an interesting topic during Edouard, Fay, Gustav or Hanna — but now? Tonight? When the real deal is bearing down on the coastline? The national news media has no freakin’ clue what’s going on. Hopefully the folks in Texas, at least, understand what’s coming.

Anyway, Alan Sullivan’s last two updates sum things up:

Update: 6:00 PM EDT: Ike is taking a wobble to the west, as I suspected it might when it got to this part of the Gulf. The great gyre is running out of sea-room, and trying to stay over water. So it is certain now: landfall will be southwest of Galveston, and the worst of the surge will pile into the Houston area. Everything has gone exactly wrong for Houston this time. It’s payback for Rita’s last minute swerve away.

Update: 7:30 PM EDT: The huge ring is contracting and forming a proper eye. Actually the storm is getting weaker — less total energy is being released. But approaching this concave coast, Ike is restructuring to fit the shape of the obstacle. It is common for tropical cyclones to intensify prior to landfall here. I have been hoping the loss of convective energy would compensate and keep intensity from increasing markedly. Everything has gone exactly wrong for Houston this time, as though Ike were payback for Rita’s last-minute swerve away, three years ago.

In a way, 2008’s Gustav-Ike duo is almost a mirror image of 2005’s Katrina-Rita duo. Three years ago, the “New Orleans” storm was the calamity, whereas the “Houston” storm turned aside, and catastrophe was averted. This time around, it was the “New Orleans” storm that spared us a full-on catastrophe, whereas the “Houston” storm is going to be very, very bad (albeit, like Katrina, not a literal “worst-case scenario”).

P.S. Dr. Jeff Masters quantifies Sullivan’s point that “actually the storm is getting weaker — less total energy is being released.” Masters writes:

Hurricane Ike is hours away from landfall on the upper Texas coast, and is already generating huge storm surges in Texas and Lousiana. Although still of Category 2 strength, Ike remains larger and more powerful than Category 5 Katrina or Category 5 Rita. As I discussed in yesterday’s blog entry, a good measure of the storm surge potential is Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE). Ike’s Integrated Kinetic Energy has fallen from 149 Terajoules this morning to 124 at 3:30 pm EDT this afternoon. However, this is still larger than the total energy Katrina had at landfall, and Ike’s storm surge potential rates a 5.1 on a scale of 1 to 6.

Meanwhile, in response to a question from a commenter (”Alan, less total energy, but wouldn’t it be more energy in the area near the eye, which would pass near Galvston and Houston? Also, that could increase the storm surge?”), Sullivan writes:

Brian, the tightening means worse winds in those locations, especially Houston metro. I don’t think it will alter the surge much unless central pressure also falls, which I do not expect. This is a mechanical effect of friction with the coast, not a real strengthening of the storm.