August 17, 2021
Now that Fred has moved on, let's take a look at the rest of the tropics. There are two more storms out there, Grace and Henri (pronounced in the French manner). Neither are a threat to us unless you're traveling somewhere. Grace could certainly be a problem for Mexico.
In the longer term there are two more tropical waves that will come off of Africa Friday and next Monday we'll need to watch, the existing waves don't look too threatening at the moment. Also, the GEFS is showing signals of something developing out of the deep Caribbean near Central America next week. I don't know if it is developing the southern end of tropical waves as they enter that area, if it's some other disturbance, or just a false signal. Sometimes the GFS/GEFS will see favorable conditions from the Eastern Pacific through the Caribbean and try to develop storms on our side instead of the Pacific when the East Pac is really the current hot spot. We'll have to watch if that trend continues and look for other models to pick up on it.
Going back to Fred, it was an interesting storm. It made a run at hurricane strength early yesterday but it never quite got there. Info on the ground from the landfall location both first hand and online reported fairly light winds (for a tropical storm) whereas locations to the east and west had winds nearing hurricane strength. The Panama City area took a pretty good punch which is interesting in that they were on the west side which is typically the weaker side. Land interaction can cause a storm to flare up right at landfall and it looks like that is what happened with Fred. There were only a few reports of tornadoes in Georgia so it is good that threat didn't materialize.
I have nothing else to report today but I'll probably send out another update around the weekend.
Have a great rest of the week!
Chris
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