ORLANDO, Fla. – The National Hurricane Center on Monday highlighted an area of low pressure over the northwestern Caribbean Sea for potential tropical development.
The NHC’s 2 p.m. outlook highlighted a tropical disturbance, an area of disorganized showers and storms, that has flared up in the western Caribbean —south of the Cayman islands and Jamaica, immediately east of the Yucatan peninsula and Belize.
Right now, it’s given a low chance of developing (10%) any further, let alone into a named storm. It’s projected to move across the Yucatan peninsula, likely producing torrential rains and possible extensive flood conditions for those areas before appearing over open water in the Bay of Campeche.
Computer models have been on and off about whether this broad circulation will try to consolidate further and become a tropical depression. At this point in time, it’s still somewhat unclear, although conditions overtop the feature are continuing to improve.
This will thankfully stay far away from Central Florida, but our friends southwest of us through the Yucatan, Belize and then eastern Mexico will want to monitor its forward movement and brace for very heavy rainfall and some gusty winds as it moves in.
One key detail you need to know is more so about the source region for this disturbance, not necessarily the disturbance itself.
Something called the Central American Gyre is trying to come together once again for a spot of redemption through the western Caribbean. It’s a phenomena we look out for annually, early on in the hurricane season and then again toward the tail end.
Last year, the gyre went on to produce both Helene and Milton, which were catastrophic storms to impact our beautiful Sunshine State.
I want us to pay attention to this because we’re going to see conditions highest up in the atmosphere only get better, especially after we reach Oct. 12.
From there, rising motions will be focused over Central America. Where there’s lift, we see surface low pressure begin to develop. That’s what disrupts the traditional flow over Central America and produces the huge, spinning gyre.
It’s within the gyre where other pieces of energy and perturbations, as they’re called, can get caught and entangled. They’ll feel the favorable upper level dynamics at play and begin to feed off of them. More moisture, more instability, less wind shear and, of course, plenty of upward motion to go around.
It’s this time of year where we watch for that particular region to produce some of our final named storms before we wrap up a hurricane season.
Mid-October looks to be our best shot at realizing a named storm or two from the western Caribbean or the southwest Gulf. The tagging of this early feature, outside of the date range mentioned above, plus what we have on satellite already, tells me we’re going to have to keep an eye down there just in case something tries to spin up on short-notice.