ORLANDO, Fla. – For my Dancing With the Stars fans out there, in the Atlantic we still have two storms performing the “Night Tango” up against our east coast, threading the needle between Bermuda and the coastline of the Carolina’s.
Humberto has officially become a lot less tropical, warranting the end of National Hurricane Center advisories for the H-named storm. Imelda is actually still on the up-and-up, becoming a Category 2 storm earlier today.
The rest of the basin is quiet, for the time being.
Conditions are looking to improve once again for systems to try and take “shape” (for my Halloween fans, ya know it being Oct. 1 and all).
From here on out, through the month of October and November as we enter the home stretch of the 2025 hurricane season, we have to start shifting gears once again as we get away from the peak and into a new phase as I like to call it.
We’re now into the fall season, which means the general layout of how our pressure features and winds come together over North America, the Pacific, and the neighboring Atlantic start to transition. In Air Force weather, we call it transition season.
This is the period of time where our weather pattern fluctuates, getting away from your heating of the day driven thunderstorm threats and moving towards when we get the large scale weather features that come barreling through to produce rains and possible severe weather.
That transitional period plays a pivotal role on our hurricane season, or what’s left of it at this point given we’re now down to two months to go.
As troughs and fronts come down more frequently, we begin to watch close to home again. If you recall, June and July were primarily characterized by old fronts helping to spin up our first few named storms.
Alongside these fronts coming down, we begin to look out for the development of an old hurricane season partner, the Central American Gyre. The gyre has produced some very notable October storms in history, Michael and Milton being some of our most recent disastrous examples.
Lastly, we still have the lingering West Africa Monsoon, and the easterly jet ripping off western Africa helping to dump more tropical waves across the tropics. While the Atlantic basin will usually start to become a lot less conducive for tropical development - this year has done nothing but NOT play by the rules.
We’re expecting another massive pulse of the Madden Julian Oscillation to come across our region. In fact, on some of our long range sub-seasonal models (weekly models), this could be one of the more aggressive passes we’ve seen so far this year.
So we end up with almost a mixed bag of different areas where we could see potential storms try and get going. We tend to get more of these storms that do take on named storm characteristics to form in land-locked areas, like the Caribbean or the Gulf.
I have always mentioned, if you take a storm and develop it in the Atlantic, you’ve got a pretty wide margin of error and your most likely outcome is a recurving system out to sea.
You put that same storm inside an area like the Caribbean or the Gulf, and try to send it in any direction, even backwards, someone will most likely end up being dealt the impacts. Climate Prediction Center has also highlighted some increased ability for the Caribbean to produce a tropical storm or two as we go through the mid-sections of October.
That’s precisely where I will be watching for all of us in Florida.