WeatherWhys: Homegrown tropical development

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Bernie Rayno explains the key factors into developing homegrown tropical systems, which typically occur in the southwestern Atlantic, the northwestern Caribbean and the Gulf of America.

Transcript

00:00All right, it's time for our WeatherWise segment where we take something complicated

00:06in the field of meteorology and make it easy to understand. We're talking about homegrown

00:11development in the tropics. Tropical development occurring close to the United States. This

00:17usually includes the Southwest Atlantic, the Gulf of America, and also the Northwest Caribbean.

00:23Now, that happens when you get an interaction between the jet stream and the tropics. That's

00:28what we're seeing here where we go into this weekend. You see that dip in the jet stream

00:33here? What that does is it starts to process for showers and thunderstorms here. And when

00:39you look at where you see development during the month of July, where do you see it? In

00:45those three basins, Gulf of America and also Northwest Caribbean, and then off the southeast

00:51coast of the United States. By the way, this area in here across the eastern part of the

00:56Caribbean. This is late in the month of July. The early part of the month has the development

01:02close to the United States. So homegrown development. How does it occur? Dips in the jet stream coming

01:09on south. We're seeing that this weekend. And what happens is as that occurs, you bring

01:15fronts and upper lows into these warm waters. What does that do? It allows showers and thunderstorms

01:21to develop. Now, those showers and thunderstorms must sit over these open waters for at least

01:2748 hours and able to develop. So that area of low pressure forms and then slowly but surely

01:34it turns into a tropical system. You don't typically get development, though, farther out into the

01:40Atlantic because of all of the wind shears. So again, homegrown development. You see it during

01:46the months of June and July. And now you know.

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