Another Chance of Development in the Tropics

August 9, 2024

Friday morning update on the tropics. The NHC is watching two systems in the Atlantic, the remnants of Debby which is finally exiting off to the northeast and a tropical wave that is about midway between Africa and the Lesser Antilles (orange 'X'). Debby is now post/extra-tropical but still poses some significant inland flooding risks. We now turn our attention to the deep tropics again.

The tropical wave mentioned above has a 60% chance of development over the next 7 days but it looks fairly certain that this system will develop by Wednesday or Thursday next week, if not a few days earlier. Unlike with Debby, there is good model consensus both for development and for the track. Right now it looks like any storm that develops would curve out to sea along the East Coast somewhere. I would say this is a medium to low confidence solution at this point because development is still several days away and because a few ensemble members do have tracks farther west (i.e. the Gulf). Also, the early solutions from the Euro with Debby had it going up the East Coast and that was not correct, although there is more model support from the GFS and Canadian models this time. I think we'll have a better idea early to mid week next week.

Despite Debby, the tropics are a bit slower than I expected them to be for mid-August. I may just be biased/jumping the gun from the expectation of an above average to hyperactive season, but this is typically when activity starts to ramp up. Earlier this week the NHC was watching a wave moving through the southern Caribbean for development but that didn't materialize. Also there are signals that the next few waves coming off of Africa will have to be watched as well, so maybe the switch is flipping on. Both CSU and NOAA issued updated seasonal forecasts recently. CSU dropped the total number of named storms by two, but left the number of hurricanes and major hurricanes unchanged. NOAA's forecast is more or less the same as it was. All the same, for those forecasts to verify we will need to start having very high levels of activity soon.

Here in the Southeast the weather looks to stay mostly warm and dry. A few coastal showers will be possible through early next week with maybe more widespread showers across the Southeast from midweek through Friday.

That's it for today, I'll probably send another update early next week.

Have a good weekend.

Chris