August 1, 2024
The situation with the tropical wave the NHC has been watching has changed quickly. About the only thing of any confidence at this point is that it is very likely that there will be some sort of tropical system in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico late Saturday or early Sunday. Development chances are still at 60% over 7 days and 20% over 2 days, so development is not certain. Unfortunately the forecast for this system is very complex with many possible outcomes. It has been designated an Invest (97L), so an additional suite of models have started to produce data. I think recon flights will start soon as well which feeds better data into the models. However, until a low level center of circulation forms, possibly by Saturday, uncertainty will remain high and might continue to remain high for some time after that. No need to get too excited at this point but folks along the Florida Panhandle, especially from the eastern to central Panhandle, need to start thinking about plans and preparations. I'll summarize some scenarios below.
Models are more or less all over the place both from run to run and between each other. I could share them with you, but I think they're going to keep changing for a while so they're not the most helpful yet other than to see the wide range of possibilities. The Euro dropped its idea of a run up the East Coast more or less which is somewhat the cause of the excitement. The future steering environment is complex and there are too many unknowns that are causing wildly different outcomes. The storm will be approaching an environment with a high pressure to the west, another high to the east, and a trough or front in between. The relative strengths and positions of these relative to the storm and its strength are unknown and causing the high model variability as things change slightly from run to run or as different models evolve each in slightly different ways.
In the following, "storm" could mean anything from a messy depression or tropical storm to potentially a strong hurricane. Here are the possibilities, not in any order: 1) Storm landfall in the Big Bend / eastern Panhandle area, with the storm potentially moving off to the northeast if it finds an exit, possibly stalling a bit along the East Coast. This has some trending model support but is by no means a lock. 2) Storm stalls either before or after landfall in scenario "1" and meanders around over land or over the water, possibly for days. 3) If "2" happens and the storm either stays over the Gulf or returns to the Gulf, which are possible scenarios, some solutions have it going west (Texas is technically in play...) before making another landfall, possibly strengthening, possibly skirting the coast or maybe offshore a bit. Some solutions keep this storm somewhere along the northern Gulf for nearly a week before it finally finds an exit to the north-northeast. It could also stall or meander inland for several days. This third scenario, or a few different versions of it, is probably a worse case as it is possible that a much stronger storm could develop than is likely in scenario "1" and/or a stalled/meandering storm could dump rain over an area for many days.
Other than maybe a short term trend for the 1st scenario, it's not really possible to say which is more likely at this point. Maybe something will change and confidence in one general solution will improve but I'm not expecting that for a few days. The next update will be Saturday or sooner if warranted.
Chris
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