September 29, 2024
Hi everyone. As far as I know none of you received any direct impacts from Helene last week, but I know of at least one person that had family members impacted in North Carolina. Helene made landfall near Keaton Beach, FL as a 140 mph storm. Helene was a large storm, in the top 10% of hurricanes by size. The areas near the landfall location are devastated with extensive storm surge and wind damage and recovery will take a long time. It was fortunate that the storm went a little more to the east, missing most of Tallahassee and Atlanta almost entirely. Other areas weren't so fortunate. What I think will become the more memorable aspect of the storm will be the flooding and inland wind damage in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. I am honestly at a loss as to what to say. I don't understand the details fully (I have some reading to do), but something called a predecessor rain event (PRE) occurred ahead of the storm followed by continued rain from the interaction with the remnants of Helene and the cutoff low that steered the storm away from the more populated areas along the coast. I think we may see the total cost of damages exceed every other natural disaster in our history. I don't remember one that impacted such a large area to such a degree.
Moving on to the current weather. As I mentioned in my last update there is the possibility of tropical development again in roughly the same area where Helene developed. The cause may be the same as well. A Central American Gyre is in the beginning stages of formation and this combined with energy from a westward moving tropical wave may combine to spawn another tropical cyclone. Details are murky at this point. If it makes you feel better the models have been less consistent for this system than they were for Helene but there is enough of a signal that the NHC is forecasting a 50% chance of development over the next 7 days. You can see from the size of the orange area that development could occur anywhere from the southwest Caribbean to the southern Gulf with timing anywhere from Tuesday to as late as Thursday or Friday. Landfall, if a storm forms, could be around the weekend or early the following week. The landfall possibilities at this point are broad and range from Louisiana to the west coast of Florida.
While this sounds like a potential repeat of Helene, I'm not so sure. The models are less consistent and not as strong overall. I know I mentioned this early with Helene, but wind shear looks to be a bigger factor this time which would hopefully limit the strength of any storm that forms. While I think we will see some kind of weather system develop I am not as concerned as I was with Helene. Not to say we couldn't be looking at another strong storm, I'm just not seeing as many signals for that as with Helene. Hopefully I'm not just overly optimistic. The models were amazing with Helene and hopefully will have more clarity on this system in a day or two.
Just in case it happens, I do want to mention that there is a small chance we could see two systems try to form, one in the southwest or western Caribbean and another in the southern Gulf. This could just be the GFS model being too aggressive but there is some ensemble support for this idea. If this were to happen it is unlikely to have two strong storms located that close together, but it may complicate the forecast.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday and have a good start to the week, I'll send out another update in a few days.
Chris
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