Travel advice for hurricane path

You'll be fine to travel to atlanta. As the hurricane is imminent, there may be a chance buildings will shut down out of an abundance of caution.

The thing to understand about hurricanes is that the wind strength drops off very quickly as you leave the center of the storm. For a massive storm like irma, you might have only 30 knot winds (difficult but possible for an airliner to land and takeoff) 80 or 100 miles from the eye. It is a roughly linear ramp towards the eye. So really damaging winds are only 30 miles or so on either side of the eye.

So you have roughly 60 mile wide paths of direct destruction with a massive storm like irma.

What you may worry about in Atlanta would be possible flooding from rain bands. If you look at the satellite of the storm, those are the long arms that stick out of the hurricane as it spins. Those can go many hundreds of miles in either direction. If you've ever lived in the tropics you're familiar with squalls. These bands basically create a whole bunch of squalls, which can dump inches of rain each in a very short time. Atlanta isn't necessarily equipped to handle this kind of rain.

I don't think you need to cancel your trip. Monitor the progress and you may want to leave early if the storm veers more towards Atlanta without being weakened by landfall with Florida first. Otherwise, the chances of you getting stuck there really aren't very realistic.

Bring your rain jacket, though.

Actually it looks like they have shifted the path to go right through Atlanta now.

Anyway, the prediction is about the same, though for winds in Atlanta, because it will weaken rapidly as it moves inland.

It will continue to dump rain as it fizzles.

http://amp.wsbtv.com/news/local/hurricane-irma-latest-storm-trahurricane+irmack-puts-north-georgia-in-irmas-path/604837978

I still expect you shouldn't see significant issues with your travel.

I would put it this way: would you travel to ORD or JFK in the winter? If so, your chances of travel delays are probably similar.

Businesses will be open.

The airport will not "shutdown".

Some streets will be temporarily covered with water.

It's a major storm... so the risk of dominoes of flight delays and cancellations/reschedules is high -- similar to any other time there is a big storm with high winds rolling through. It's also on every news station as the most devastating end-of-the-world dogs-and-cats-living-together fireball from the sky storm of the century (which is somewhat true for the coastal/island direct hits) but people are watching CNN in atlanta and knoxville and ohio and having unnecessary heart attacks... so there will be at least a small flurry of panic travelers. If you have a tight schedule for a return flight then that should really be your only concern.

While the ATL won't entirely shut down, and indoors at the airport will be business as usual, it's prone to ground stops during normal and common summer thunderstorms (corporate risk management policy frowns upon having your ramp workers and wing walkers at risk of getting hit by lightning). If you live in Atlanta it's business as usual, but as a veteran of the aforementioned ATL ground stops and the chaos they can cause on your travel plans, I'd defer travel a few days until flight schedules normalize again.

Delta has weather waivers up that will allow you to reschedule flights without change fees within certain parameters. If for some reason you're on another airlines, they're probably going to have similar easy rebooking options.

Thank you all for your help. My return trip is on Friday, so I would hope everything will be clear and back to normal by then. As of now I'm still planning to go but expect the flight there might be complicated by delays and cancellations and such.