ORLANDO, Fla. – Hurricane season is doing its very best to make its presence known for the Atlantic basin. The Eastern Pacific has absolutely cooked off some monstrous storms as of late, with another major hurricane checked off the list headed away from the coastline of Mexico.
Our attention has since shifted from the eastern Pacific to the Atlantic. Two named storms have come and gone in what feels like the blink of an eye.
Today we’re watching right off the beaches of Central Florida, especially if you reside anywhere from Brevard up to Nassau county Florida.
Models are quickly fixating on an area of low pressure that could spin up as a result of a marinating front that’s expected to come down through Thursday and your Fourth of July, leaving a tail of energy over open water. Warm water.
Water temperatures off either of our shores are anywhere between 85-90 degrees. You only need about 80 degrees to generate tropical thunderstorms, let alone a full-fledged storm.
Currently we’re sitting at a 40% chance of tropical formation. I do fully anticipate this continues to rise. In fact, the hurricane hunters have already begun to draw up plans to fly into a potential area of investigation by the Fourth of July.
What does this mean for us?
Rain chances will go up. We know this. Winds will likely increase as we head into the weekend.
Let’s breakdown a bit of the specifics of what we know now, to get you as much lead time before the weekend arrives as possible.
General Impacts
If we see a low pressure area start to develop off the east coast of Florida, there’s a couple of things working for us. Given how winds flow around a low, counter-clockwise, a bulk of Central Florida and especially the immediate east coast counties will receive “Offshore” flow. This means, winds will be blowing out to sea as opposed to directly inland.
This helps us in terms of any type of low-end beach erosion, rough coastal conditions, or any possible close to shore flooding that could arise if we had 30-40 mph wind gusts trying to blow water inland.
Of course, we error on the side of caution by emphasizing this all depends on exactly where our low tries to close off.
One additional piece of the puzzle comes with where the bulk of our rain could be located as this set up gets underway. It seems as the front drapes across our local area, a large majority of the moisture will find its way over the bottom half of the peninsula.
This means at sunrise on Independence Day, if you’re south of Polk and Osceola counties, you may wake up to rain already falling. The northern side of the peninsula will actually experience afternoon development of showers and storms. Some may try to get strong based on some of the ingredients we have coming together.
During the warmest parts of the day, like our traditional sea breeze storms, northern counties or those of you north of the four corners counties will start to see an increase in your thunderstorm chances.
Finally, throughout the course of this unfolding, our winds will remain out of the south and west with gusts picking up steam as our system tries to get underway.
The BEST part? It’s most likely not coming our way.
If the low pressure forms off our east coast, the way our steering current is situated right now indicates it will then lift away from Florida altogether. So while we’ll see rains and wind coming at us for a bulk of your long weekend, we won’t sustain a direct hit.
We’ve had numerous named storms develop in this same rough spot, and most tend to traverse the east United States coast before either being ripped apart by the jet stream or ejecting out into the Atlantic. Some computer models suggest it could slingshot back into the coast of the Mid-Atlantic states, but we’ll need to wait and see if we first achieve an identifiable system.
What Comes Next?
After this? We might see another infamous yellow blip appear on the National Hurricane Centers home page. We’re watching for a suspicious tropical wave slowly migrating through the pattern into the western Atlantic.
It’s about to run into some decent upper level winds and very warm waters in the subtropical Atlantic. Models are slowly starting to magnetize to this feature, developing it into another area of low pressure that could try to take on a name.
This would happen well after the Fourth of July, and stay away from Florida this go around.
Our next two names on the 2025 hurricane season list are Chantal and Dexter. We’ll keep you updated round-the-clock here at News 6, so please be sure to check back with us for all your tropical weather information.