On Thursday, National Hurricane Center finally tagged an area of interest in the central Caribbean Sea in response to an aggressive tropical wave we’ve been monitoring moving west through the tropical Atlantic. Models are still in agreement there could be some development and further organization as it gets closer to Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands.
It will likely start to move into the Caribbean later this weekend and through early next week. That piece of the puzzle we’ve got perfectly fitting in the puzzling forecast.
Otherwise, that’s truthfully how much black and white we’ve managed to fill in. The rest is left with quite a bit of grey area.
The pattern becomes very convoluted the deeper this system heads into the Caribbean Sea. In just the last twenty-four hours, computer models have gone back and forth from showing a bit of agreement on what a likely outcome COULD look like, to showing us all sorts of conflicting stories and messages.
We’ve got a marathon of cold fronts and troughs pushing cooler air coming across the Northern United States that are projected to reach southward into the Western Atlantic and the Upper border of the Caribbean islands.
Because of this, we’re going to see lots of oscillating and moving around of our surface pressure features. High pressure will wander back and forth, and low pressures will ride the aggravated jet stream, trying to force cooler weather across the eastern United States.
Our weather will be looking pretty good moving forward, with a slight chance for rain with our next cold front. That same front will bring down another batch of high pressure and increase our upper-level ridging that changes the way winds flow across the south, the Gulf, and the Western Caribbean.
While this is happening, we can’t forget the same cold front and upper trough that first passed through Central Florida continuing on eastward through the Atlantic. That’s also going to influence what our steering pattern winds look like.
Towards the last several days of the month, beginning around the 23rd of October, we may come to a point where the flow becomes somewhat neutral in the Caribbean.
It might go stagnant and weak. This is what’s really causing havoc with our computer models. Some show a developing feature going stationary for days on end.
When a system goes stationary, or tries to stall out even without fully doing so, it becomes excessively difficult for our physics-based global models to then compute the intensive equations they use to generate the weather solutions we use for our forecast. You get some pretty spectacular but untrustworthy results.
We’re left with three solutions on the table, and unfortunately, none of them have gained a ton of credence considering the inconsistencies we’re continuously seeing in our models.
This will boil down to the intensity of our system, and the timing of everything to include when it gets strong enough to feel the flow, potentially causing a stall, pushing it west, or lifting it north at some point.