ORLANDO, Fla. – Despite many under the impression we wouldn’t see a named storm through the month of June, let alone three by this time in the hurricane season, Tropical Storm Chantal became our most organized storm of the season so far.
This was as “home-grown” of a tropical feature as you could get.
A front came down from up north, pushed southward by our jet stream and an upper level trough earlier last week. The tail of it was broken off right over the Gulf stream current off the Central Florida east coast.
Almost immediately, we went to bed one night and woke up to a cluster of showers and storms bubbling over the warm waters.
Within 24 hours, a circulation came together, and Chantal was born.
Chantal has officially claimed the crown for most impressive storm of the Atlantic basin a month and some change into the 2025 hurricane season. Sunday morning, recon aircraft managed to capture a max sustained wind of roughly 60 mph and a central pressure of 1002 millibars.
There was a lot of discussion as to whether we’d even see a depression form off the Florida Space Coast, but if you stuck with News 6 you already had a glimpse of what the end result would look like. The warm waters of the western Atlantic fueled by the Gulf Stream and our dominating subtropical ridge that hung around much of June helped increase the potential for development.
Chantal helped prove once more that warm waters can really influence a tropical feature’s life cycle.
Now the mid-Atlantic region continues to battle rough weather and flash flooding sparked by Chantal’s remnants. The National Hurricane Center issued the final advisory for the storm as of 5 a.m. Monday morning. The torrential tropical rains however are far from over.
BUT!
Chantal has exited the board, and the Atlantic is quiet once again.
What happens now?
Enjoy this lull once again. With nearly everything in our atmosphere, whether it be daytime thunderstorms, winter storms, tropical storms, you always need a period after a big event to rest and recoup. In this case, the atmosphere needs to recharge.
Yes, this is a real thing.
Our pattern flipped upside down after such an extended period spent baking under drier weather and heat. The changing of our flow over the U.S. is what helped introduce Chantal to all of us as our third named storm of the season.
This also helped flip a switch across the Atlantic. Because high pressure has weakened over the basin, and retreated back toward the east, winds have weakened over our Main Development Region. This is the area of water between the west coast of Africa and right around the Lesser Antilles of the eastern Caribbean.
There’s been some notable warmth that’s extended through where our tropical waves tend to move, especially during peak months like August, September and October.
For the time being, at least the next couple weeks deeper into July, our Atlantic pressure pattern should remain much more tame than what we witnessed in May and June. This will allow our waters to come up in temperature a little bit more.
Could this be priming us for peak hurricane season? Time will tell, there’s still a good bit to go before we hit the middle of August (despite how fast time has been moving).
We’re also going to monitoring another pass of the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO). This is forecast to arrive in our Atlantic area during the second half of July, especially the last two weeks.
We’ll have to see how much this tickles the atmosphere in terms of lift and moisture. From there, if we have tropical waves present on the game board, we may start seeing more areas of interest popping up once again.
My time table is July 15. From here, we may start to see portions of the Atlantic “waking up.” This is especially the case as we approach the turning point from July into August. I am already actively watching a few areas in the long-term for our next chance at a spin up.
So mark your calendars. If you’re still putting any type of preparation on the backburner, we’ve got some time before the next yellow blip hits the National Hurricane Center homepage.
After that, I feel we’ll be getting a lot busier here at News 6 providing you with accurate, timely and reliable tropical weather updates day by day.