00:00It's going to be that time of the year. Believe it or not, the hurricane season actually is officially underway
00:05in the East Pacific, and it's about to begin in the Atlantic, and we need to keep an eye out
00:10for the potential for some homegrown development.
00:14Now, the two hurricane seasons, I say two, we're talking about the Central and East Pacific versus the Atlantic. They
00:21technically are on different time scales. The East Pacific is underway. It started back on May 15th. No tropical activity
00:28out there yet.
00:29If we were to mark where we are now, here we are about halfway between May 15th and June 1st,
00:34and again, we're getting close to the start of the Atlantic hurricane season.
00:38In both cases, these two seasons run until November 30th.
00:41Now, when it comes to the Atlantic hurricane season, by volume, certainly by volume, the majority of the action is
00:52between August and Halloween, August, September, October, so generally this area here.
00:59But statistically, about 50% to 60% of the time we'll see a named storm in the month of
01:04June, or at least by July 1st.
01:06So, again, this is approximately where we are. We're approaching kind of the time frame when storms begin to dribble
01:13in, at least in some form.
01:16So, as we take you forward in time, we want to take a look at what we're facing now and
01:22where we often do see storms form.
01:25Now, in the early part of the hurricane season, tropical waves that traverse the Atlantic tend to face dry air
01:34and extra wind shear.
01:35That's why we don't really see those Cabo Verde storms from Cape Verde, Cabo Verde there, off the west side
01:43of Africa.
01:44We look to that area around the end of August, September, and October for those long-track tropical waves that
01:50take one to two weeks to get here.
01:52We tend to see early or preseason development.
01:55I don't think we're going to see preseason development.
01:57Probably not, but we tend to see that occur through another means of development, and that's when the jet stream,
02:04which camps out in mid-summer and late summer all the way up north into Canada,
02:08well, in the early season, that still tends to occasionally be generally living between I-10 and Interstate 70 or
02:18so.
02:18It kind of wavers around between maybe the latitude of the Pennsylvania-Maryland line or areas around St. Louis and
02:25the Gulf Coast.
02:26Now, at times, you get a strong cold front that moves on through, and it dumps the jet stream really
02:33far to the south,
02:33and at times, a portion of the southern branch can camp out even into the Gulf.
02:39Now, when that happens, when these tropical systems sometimes get a little bit of a kick in the pants by
02:46some jet stream energy in June or maybe late May, June, early July,
02:52it tends to happen through this homegrown development setup, and Bernie developed this graphic, and I really like how it
02:58kind of explains things.
02:59Interaction between the jet, which is not going to happen in August or September much, but in June it can
03:05happen, late May it can happen,
03:07and the tropics. If we find a weak disturbance that brings extra tropical moisture in, and it can interact with
03:15the jet stream, the southern branch,
03:18and if these two can be kind of co-located and an area of low pressure can sit over the
03:23water for 48 hours or more,
03:27then suddenly we may see early season development. That's a key part of this year.
03:31It needs to, I often say that it needs to marinate over the same area long enough, and we can
03:36see development.
03:37Now, water temps, it's still pretty cool up there in most areas, but we're getting to that time of the
03:42year where some spots,
03:43we actually are a little above average temperature-wise here for most of the Atlantic,
03:47and some of these areas, you know, it's warm enough to support activity soon.
03:52I'm going to take you into this look here in the models.
03:56We're going to go about 20,000 feet up into the atmosphere, 500 millibars, trying to sniff out an opportunity
04:01for the jet stream to dip south
04:03and a disturbance in the Caribbean to perhaps meet up with that.
04:08So this weekend, not much going on.
04:11Now, there's a weak zone of low pressure.
04:13I can even plot that for you here with this tool.
04:17There's a weak zone of low pressure generally kind of hanging out over the area near the Bahamas, a little
04:22east of there.
04:23Some extra enhanced showers and storms.
04:25You can see a tropical disturbance drifting west.
04:27Not a traditional tropical wave, but there are some weak waves out there.
04:30But look at what happens in the jet stream over Louisiana.
04:35And late this coming week, this is the week ending after Memorial Day, around the 29th, 30th of May.
04:43Suddenly, we do have a dip in the jet stream here.
04:46You can see that sagginess here and some extra jet stream energy.
04:50And what happens down in the Caribbean, there's a little filament of energy east of Roatan, Honduras, and that's northbound
04:58while we have this dip in the jet stream.
05:00So late in the next week and into the weekend that will end May, the weekend after Memorial Day, you
05:08can see a little bit of interaction there,
05:09a little bit of interaction between this dip in the jet stream and that disturbance that crosses Florida.
05:15That's the European.
05:16What's this look like in the GFS world?
05:19Well, I'm going to load a different version of this here so I can show this to you here.
05:24But as we're moving forward here with the GFS, you can see initially the jet stream energy.
05:30It's kind of camping out over the lower part of the Mississippi Valley.
05:34Wednesday, Thursday, we begin to see a little bit more of a push.
05:36Now, if we were to compare it with the European, European's a little deeper, GFS a little more timid, but
05:45the signal is generally there.
05:47It's just not as deep.
05:48Meanwhile, the signal within the GFS is a little stronger for this disturbance east of Honduras to be pulling north.
05:55But you can see with a flatter disturbance, a flatter wave in the jet stream here with the GFS, it's
06:02a little more restricted to the north.
06:05But they get a little closer to one another.
06:07Do they fully interact?
06:08We'll have to see.
06:09It might be a little too far east to impact the Bahamas.
06:13But overall, here's the GFS, and the signal would be some very heavy rain out of that disturbance near eastern
06:20sides of Cuba.
06:22With the European, with that deeper dip in the jet stream over the Gulf, here is a little bit of
06:27drought relief in South Florida coming out of that.
06:30So as we kind of just wrap this up and show you one single graphic, two graphics, in fact.
06:35I'm going to show you this graphic, and then I'll end with the other one.
06:39There is potential for some increased moisture drawn north with some jet stream interaction, and that gives us a limited
06:47chance for development as we begin the month of June down that way.
06:50That's your forecast feed.
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