ORLANDO, Fla. – I truly hope you enjoyed the Memorial Day weekend to the best of your ability, especially given the severe weather instances we observed Saturday and Sunday.
If you’re off Monday, definitely take full advantage as you can, and dodge some of our sea-breeze action expected to take off once again around the 4-5 p.m. timeframe.
[WATCH VIDEO BELOW FOR Orlando-area FORECAST]
Monday officially marks the commencement of Hurricane Week at News 6. Through Friday, we will roll out plenty of content fully catered toward preparing you for the upcoming season ahead.
Our goal is to better equip you as your go-to news outlet, with knowledge and expertise you can use to safeguard your home and property, but most of all keep your loved ones protected during Mother Nature’s worst.
With that being said, it looks like immediately following our hurricane week, we’ll be watching a spot in the tropics that may try to produce our first named storm of the season.
Before we go any further, let’s lay the foundation of what’s ahead. Nothing is set in stone quite yet. We are still anywhere from seven to 14 days away from anything tropical attempting to manifest itself out there.
We have data pinpointing that conditions will be RIPE for something to try and consolidate into a weak named storm. But there are also a few pieces to the meteorological puzzle that suggest this could result in nothing more than lots of rain for our Sunshine State, which would be a beautiful thing.
Alright, let’s dig into the science now.
The whole premise of possible tropical energy doing its thing as we head into the first half of June all lies within our MJO, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a large swath of moisture, storms and, most of all, lift that continues revolving around our globe year-round. This is one of the primary “intra-seasonal” factors we closely watch, especially moving through a hurricane season.
Typically when the MJO comes across an area, it acts like an ocean wave you’d see at the beach. As a wave begins to approach the shoreline, you notice the water pulls away from the shore, increasing the wave height before it crashes down and the water relaxes on the backside of the wave. Same concept!
As the MJO moves in, the air begins to rise, and a phenomena called “diffluence” increases. This is essentially the spreading of the air horizontally at the highest point in our atmosphere. This increases the rising motions we observe beneath the MJO pulse. It also effectively stirs the environment in the lower levels, creating spin and instability which produces more rainfall.
Another factor that lines up timing-wise with what models are pointing out in the tropics is a change in our weather pattern over the United States. If you’ve read previous articles of mine, I’ve made mention of things like “teleconnections” and the “Pacific North American Oscillation”.
The PNA and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) are two big ones we’re watching throughout the season. In this case, both of these could play a role in whatever decides to flare up in the central and western Caribbean Sea over the next two weeks.
As our weather pattern over the United States begins to swing from one end to the other, from a dominating ridge of high pressure to a trough extending down toward Florida from up north, this will do a couple of different things for areas south of our area. When I say south, I mean into the Yucatan Peninsula, the western Caribbean and parts of the Greater Antilles.
From a large bubble of high pressure to a trough shifts steering winds across much of the Southeast, the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea. Where does the NAO come into this? The NAO is forecast to be slightly stronger during the first half of June. This means our Atlantic high pressure will likely be a bit more intense, pushing moisture and rains in the tropics further westward.
If we kept our weather the same here in the states, and combined that with a positive NAO (strong Atlantic high), anything in the Caribbean or the Gulf would be bullied west into Central America or Mexico. This is precisely what happened last year when Tropical Storm Alberto formed in the Bay of Campeche. High pressure pushed it as far west as possible, crashing it ashore along the coast of northern Mexico.
That may not be the case this time. The PNA is expected to flip to a positive state, meaning high pressure in the west, a trough over us in the East. The trough acts like a magnet, pulling moisture and showers northward up from the Caribbean towards the southern United States. The reinforcing Bermuda high pressure over the Atlantic keeps stuff from being slingshot out into open water.
The trough can also help stimulate even more lift in some cases. That’s precisely what helped manifest a few of our named storms from the 2024 season.
Now, that’s where the potential fail scenarios come in - troughs also tend to increase wind shear, and tropical features despise wind shear. It acts like a razor blade, trimming the tops of thunderstorms before they can get too strong and high in the air.
A trough also usually carries with it cooler, drier air, which could suffocate any organized low pressure. The strong high pressure to the east, and a digging trough toward the west could pinch stuff off and create more of a river or deluge of showers and rain for us versus anything with a name.
If you’ve rocked with me this far into the setup, the timeframe I am pinpointing specifically begins June 4 and extends out just beyond June 15. It seems this window of time will be most favorable for something to make an attempt at further organizing. However, again, this doesn’t immediately mean it will happen. If the Eastern Pacific hogs all the help from our MJO, the Caribbean and Gulf will essentially be shut down.
Hurricane season officially begins in a few more days. This is a reminder even if there’s nothing on the horizon now, things can change PRETTY quickly. So let’s make sure we’re prepared now, and stick with us through Hurricane Week to get all your pertinent questions answered as fast as we can.