The 2007 hurricane season certainly began with a bang with two weak systems, one even before the official start to the season. But since those two early storms, the tropics have been very quiet. But that could be changing just as we are about to enter the peak months of August and September.
The National Hurricane Center’s daily Tropical Weather Outlook mentions a westward moving tropical wave 950 miles east of the southern Windward Islands – near 11 and 50 (latitude/longitude). The wave shows signs of organization and some slow development of the system is possible. I took a look at the visible satellite imagery just a few minutes ago, and this system is the first one that has shown any promise of development. The Hurricane Center has run their computer models on this system, and the models are in close agreement tracking the potential storm across the southern Windward Islands and into the eastern Caribbean over the next five days.
I would like to make it clear that it’s just fine by me if we go through another hurricane season with no storms of consequence. But that is probably not a likely scenario. And I’ve mentioned a couple of times in Blog posts as well as in Weather Brains netcasts that the tropics (Caribbean and South Atlantic) sure have been cloud-free for a good while allowing lots of sunshine to beat down on the ocean surface to produce some well warmed water. This could be easily setting the stage for the next weak disturbance to come along and tap into that energy.
While it’s much too early to speculate on the future track of a storm that has yet to be named, there are some disturbing patterns in the longer range model guidance that suggest we may be facing a western Gulf storm – namely the GFS forecast of a substantial ridge over Bermuda that could keep a storm suppressed across the Caribbean. My good friend Kevin Selle from Dallas has been whispering Galveston for several days – unfortunately I’ve stopped listening to him since he’s been saying that when there aren’t even clouds in the western Gulf. But maybe he’s onto something!!
By the way, should this storm become better organized and the Hurricance Center names it, the storm would be Chantal. I’m sure of one thing – lots of eyes will be watching the future progress of that cloud mass.
-Brian-
