ORLANDO, Fla. – Things got busy pretty quickly no sooner did we flip our calendars to the month of August. We’ve already achieved one additional named storm and we’re tracking two active potential candidates in the making.
One of which has shown up in a VERY familiar spot.
Do you remember Tropical Storm Chantal? While it wasn’t a Florida threat, it was a fast, close-to-home spinup that went on to make landfall in the Carolinas. It drove their heavy rain and flood conditions up quickly, similar to what Barry did in central Texas.
We also had two different iterations of Invest 93L, in the exact same spot.
Take a look at the National Hurricane Center’s outlook.
As of the 8 a.m. update, we’ve seen the yellow turn to orange with a 10% chance of tropical formation over the next two days and up to 40% over the next week. I do believe these will continue to increase throughout the day Tuesday, and the potential first glance we see of a spin starting to come together begins by Thursday.
Now, there’s a lot more than meets the eye here, not solely the possibility of another named storm taking shape. From a forecasting perspective, we have to unpack a key detail that may influence what happens down the road towards peak hurricane season.
What are the odds something new forms?
Before I take you into a brief deep-dive, let’s talk about the odds we see our next tropical storm to our immediate northeast. Models are pretty confident a low pressure center forms in the next three or four days. It’s pretty likely, if not by later Tuesday, we see chances per the NHC start going up percentage-wise.
Even our in-house computer models anticipate something to start brewing off the east/northeast coast of Florida before hopefully lifting away. There are a few model solutions that suggest this avoids land altogether, just as Dexter has.
But we also have rebuilding high pressure both in the wake of Dexter to the north and back across the western Atlantic ocean, attempting to push back westward over us again.
This would act to give this circulation a little nudge, like someone elbowing you while sitting beside you, kicking it back toward either the southeast or mid-Atlantic U.S.
Ensemble probabilities for formation are amped at the moment, coming in close to 90% chance at least a tropical depression develops. The “ceiling,” or the strongest potential end game for a system like this, is a tropical storm. This would be a repeat of what we observed during Chantal’s development and lifecycle.
Now, here’s the kicker ...
WHY do we keep getting features to randomly spin up off our coastline? It has a lot to do with the heat wave, if not several heat waves Central Florida has had to fight through the last couple of months.
We’ve essentially focused a lot of the instability, lift and heat close to home. This was a concern earlier in the year of ours as well. Now we’ve made matters a tad worse with stubborn high pressure ridging keeping our rain chances on and off but stopping temperatures from sinking below the mid to upper 90s.
In the short-term, we’re already seeing what this region of more than favorable conditions can do. In the long-term, it bears monitoring especially once we hit the fall.
Even within the next seven to 10 days, our next area of interest in the Atlantic has an option to try and move westward closer to the mainland U.S. If it does, a few of our global computer models show a slow to organize process before wandering into this area of greatly charged up water temperatures.
We’ll need to watch this as we go through August and September.
Late September and especially October, even more so in my opinion (as we tend to see a return to these close-to-home, homegrown features coming off the U.S.) as stronger cold fronts start coming down during the switch from summer to fall.
In October, the Central American Gyre tends to make a return, which has created some VERY notorious hurricanes Floridians are incredibly familiar with (Helene, Michael, and Milton to name a few).