Update on Invest 95L

October 24, 2020

Invest 95L is up to 90% chance of development this morning. When the NHC speaks of development, they mean the chance that a tropical cyclone may form. It doesn't indicate anything about how strong the storm may get, etc. A tropical depression is the first stage in the tropical cyclone lifecycle and this is what the 90% chance is forecasting the potential for.

Getting back to 95L, Levi Cowan of Tropical Tidbits provided a good explanation last night of what the future may hold, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJjq_dHzvfI. In short, he mentioned that there's quite a bit of uncertainty on where the storm may go. However, that was over 12 hours ago and many models seem to be consolidating around a general track. You can see various models below, but the basic idea is that a high pressure will form in the western Atlantic that the storm will steer around. That's why you see a tight jog to the left and then a slow curve back to the right. When Levi made his discussion yesterday, there was still the possibility of a strong storm forming quickly and moving off to the northeast only to be hooked back to the west into the Gulf. That may be completely off the table now. I'd like to see this trend hold for another 12-24 hours to feel better about it. Regardless of the general trend, notice that there's quite a bit of spread even in the short term. That's to be expected for a storm that hasn't really formed a well defined structure yet, each of the members have their own guess when and where that will occur and that's why the spread is so wide.

Hurricane spaghetti models:

GFS ensembles:

Euro ensembles:

UK ensembles:

Moving on to intensity, so far we're not looking at anything too concerning. You can see the intensity guidance below and most of the track plots above are color coded for intensity. I think the wind shear in the Gulf may be a bit too strong to allow for a lot of strengthening but since we're probably not going to see a landfall until Wednesday or Thursday there is time for that to change.

To summarize all of this, I think we can be fairly certain the the Gulf Coast somewhere from the TX/LA border to the Florida Big Bend will be impacted by a storm that could range from a messy rain maker to maybe, stretching it a bit here, maybe a category 1 hurricane. Again this could evolve but right now I'm not overly concerned about a major impact just yet, let's see what the next 24-48 hours brings.

Have a good Saturday.

Chris