ROCK wrote: love the way GFS likes to plow ridges....![]()
You're looking at the surface and 850 MB ridges as a proxy for steering flow, which is a huge mistake in this case (assuming the surface cyclone is that strong and vertically deep).
The GFS is certainly not plowing the cyclone into the ridge at a level that would be steering it (i.e. 500 MB). The model is turning it northward toward a breach in that ridge caused by a short wave trough.
http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/nwprod ... loop.shtml
Whether or not this verifies that far down the road remains to be seen, of course. However, the GFS solution makes perfect sense for the 500MB pattern that it's showing, given a cyclone of that strength.