Here we go again! You’d think that a rational person would learn a lesson from past events. Maybe that explains a lot of things in my life, but let’s not go there. I’m actually going to take a slightly different tact than I did with the disturbed area that I thought might become Jerry. My new tact is very simple – I’m not going to use the name explicitly.
As I noted in the Weather Xtreme Video this morning, an area of clouds and showers over the Bahamas and South Florida will move slowly westward. The National Hurricane Center noted in their latest Tropical Weather Outlook that some slow development was possible over the next several days. One of the issues is the Florida Peninsula. There is not likely to be much development as long as much of the disturbance is over land. As we saw with the Jerry-that-was-not-to-be (gads, sounds like we’re in a Harry Potter book), that disturbance hung close to the Florida coast with the result that it did not develop into a depression or storm so was never named.
The current scenario – and for that matter, the model projections – suggests that this disturance may take a similar path across South Florida into the eastern Gulf of Mexico but a bit further south away from land. Our two main models, the NAM and the GFS, have different solutions. The NAM continues to develop the storm, and the 18Z run showed a 1000 millibar low a couple of hundred miles south-southeast of the southeast coast of Louisiana. In all fairness, as I write this, the latest GFS is not in, so I have to revert to the 12Z run. The GFS moves it more westerly and doesn’t do much with it at all outside of keeping the Gulf “nervous.”
I think the NAM seems to have a better handle on the situation than the GFS does. Kind of strange because the GFS has historically been pretty bullish on tropical disturbances. As with the Jerry-that-was-not-to-be, the projections are to keep the center of the disturbance away from land and water temperatures over the eastern Gulf are running warm. The values from the buoys I reviewed were in the 84 to 85 degree range.
The other item of note is that the disturbance is moving from an area with about 30-knots of wind shear toward an area off the west coast of Florida with about 5-knots of wind shear. So it would seem several factors come down on the positive side favoring development.
The reason that this is so interesting stems from our severe drought. The GFS and the NAM are both forecasting a flat upper air pattern toward the middle of the week. This could mean a weak disturbance or even the N-storm (the Storm-that-I-wish-not-to-name-explicitly) just might come up this way and provide some relief from the drought. So actually I’m probably crossing over from scientific meteorology to I-sure-hope-this-happens meteorology.
Whatever happens it is going to be interesting to watch events unfold. Now if I could just find a good wizard…
-Brian-
PS By the way, the Storm-that-I-wish-not-to-name-explicitly would have the name Noel IF, IF it gets a name.
