Storm Likely to Form in the Western Gulf Soon

September 12, 2021

There's a lot going on in the tropics this morning but I'm going to spend most of my time talking about Invest 94L in the Bay of Campeche. You can see there are several other areas that need to be watched, with the area near the Bahamas and the wave coming off of Africa being potential threats to the East Coast and Lesser Antilles (and points westward later) respectively.

Invest 94L has a 90% chance of development and is expected to become a tropical depression within 24 hours. You can see a selection of model tracks below. I could show you many more but they all show the same trend. The majority of the intensity models show a tropical storm at the strongest. The middle of the road guidance is for a tropical storm to impact the middle to upper Texas coast on Tuesday. This will likely be an east-weighted storm so rain impacts will extend well into Louisiana and perhaps MS and AL. With that being said there are some caveats to the forecast. Levi Cowan mentioned in his Tropical Tidbits video yesterday that a weaker storm will go more to the north-northwest and a stronger storm will go more to the north-northeast. From what I'm seeing this morning I'm leaning towards the stronger solutions. And even though most intensity models don 't strengthen this very much, I think they may be a bit biased on the low end. For one thing, a low level center has yet to form and until this does models are just sort of guessing when and where that will happen. Second, the 06Z run of the GFS run keeps the storm offshore until the western LA coast. It strengthens the storm to near hurricane strength offshore, which feels more steering flow to the northeast, and brings in ashore in western LA as a tropical storm. This is one solution but I'm leaning more towards this scenario. 94L won't have a long time thankfully but in the short term conditions are favorable for development and strengthening, we've all seen how fast these can spin up. On Monday and Tuesday the storm will start to be influenced by wind shear again which is why the models are limiting intensification. However, if it manages to intensify a bit and starts moving towards the north-northeast it will be moving with the shear somewhat. Due to this the relative shear over the storm will be a little lower. Combining this with a longer track over water leads me to think we could see a stronger storm than what is being shown now. I'm not seeing anything that suggests a really strong storm, but I think a hurricane impacting the Louisiana coast is certainly possible. Once a center forms we will know more and hopefully we'll get a few hurricane hunter flights in there which will help the models as well.

I've said a lot, mainly it helps me consolidate my thoughts to write them down. I don't think this will be a major wind or storm surge event, and it looks to stay to the west of most of us, but I think this has the potential to sneak up on people.

That is it for today, we'll see how things evolve over the next day or so. Once this thing in the Gulf moves on later in the week we'll take a look at the rest of the tropics again.

Have a great Sunday.

Chris