00:00Well, we are about to begin the official Atlantic hurricane season.
00:04June 1st is knocking on our door.
00:06Monday, and, well, we're not going to see anything immediately change when the clock strikes midnight.
00:12But officially, just like a big roll-up door at some kind of a business storefront,
00:17the Atlantic hurricane season will be underway.
00:20And open for business here.
00:22Let's take a look at what's going on right now.
00:24When we look at the satellite loop, there is some moisture roaming through parts of Central America.
00:30And, again, there are some gyre-like qualities.
00:33You can see a little bit of a hint of some broad circulation, kind of favoring the Pacific side right
00:38now.
00:38There's also another zone of low-pressure aloft that's spinning its wheels over the Bay of Campeche,
00:44and that's drifting north into the Gulf.
00:46And there's going to be this general funneling of moisture.
00:49You can see a general migration of that northward through Central America, Nicaragua, Honduras.
00:54A lot of the more active stuff, though, on the Pacific side.
00:57And we're going to go through these daily cycles of convections flaring up and then diminishing once again.
01:02So how do we get early season development?
01:05One of the things we often look to is homegrown development.
01:08And it often happens within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coastline, maybe 1,000 miles or so.
01:15Western Caribbean, Western Atlantic, and the Gulf.
01:18And we often talk about how one way to do it, which often does happen in the Atlantic hurricane season
01:25early on in June,
01:27is through homegrown development.
01:28When there's a dip in the jet stream and when they become amplified,
01:31when you get upper-level winds that come all the way south down into areas near the Yucatan,
01:35if that sits for long enough, you can get an area of spin to begin to develop over parts of
01:42the Gulf.
01:43Sometimes it can kind of happen like that.
01:45Sometimes it can also be something born out of, again, a little bit of a southward push can help to
01:52spin up more of a gyre on the south side.
01:55If that doesn't camp out for long enough, if this dip in the jet stream doesn't have residence time of
02:01maybe two days or so,
02:03then we're probably not going to see a whole lot really develop.
02:05So what are we doing right now?
02:07Let's take a look at the flow at 500 millibars, 20,000 feet up into the atmosphere, about five miles
02:14up there.
02:15And it's a good kind of just, if you had to pick one altitude to take the character of the
02:20middle chunk of the atmosphere,
02:22this is probably it.
02:23And what we begin with is this upper-level low that's spinning over the southwestern Gulf.
02:30This is the way it looks Saturday afternoon in the GFS.
02:33Here it is in the European.
02:34We're not looking too far into the future, so we're going to find some pretty good agreement here between the
02:38models.
02:39Now, as you likely would surmise, the farther into the future you go,
02:43the more disparities we find between one model opinion and another.
02:47You can see that that generally just kind of fades over parts of Mexico,
02:51but a new chunk of energy in the world of the GFS moves across Guatemala and Belize.
02:57And watch what happens with this.
02:58That cedes a new zone of development here.
03:01Maybe not development, but a new zone of at least some spin and rotation in the atmosphere.
03:06And it's loosely traced by these little wind barbs hinting at circulation over the west central Gulf.
03:15That would be Tuesday night to Wednesday morning.
03:17What comes of that?
03:18Well, the jet stream dip is too far east.
03:23We're actually going to have a second blast of cool Sunday-Monday into New England,
03:28reinforcing what we experience now and through Saturday.
03:31And that's going to be just a pair of cold fronts that kind of spin through the atmosphere out there.
03:36And that's going to favor the West Atlantic for the location of this dip in the jet stream.
03:41But it's too far removed from anything here.
03:44There are weak little tracers of that a little farther south.
03:47But I don't think it's going to be able to really influence what goes on in the central part of
03:53the Gulf much.
03:54So we're going to be dealing with this area of general low pressure over the Gulf.
03:58It just kind of spins and camps out for a few days.
04:00And it may get nudged a little farther south here late next week through the help of the GFS.
04:06You can see that the tail of the front pushes a little farther south.
04:09Let's see what goes on in the European.
04:12We also see, similarly, early next week, a chunk of spin in the atmosphere across the Yucatan.
04:19And here it is.
04:20We begin to see this area of spin here into the west-central Gulf.
04:25Not that different from the GFS.
04:28And in the European model, it does drift a little farther north.
04:32Here we are Wednesday evening.
04:34GFS back into the southwestern Gulf.
04:37European a little farther north this time around.
04:39And that could perhaps continue to drift north.
04:43I don't think this would become a tropical depression if we take this at face value.
04:46But there would be a little zone of low pressure up into areas around Panama City Beach, Florida
04:50that would bring additional drought relief up that way.
04:53Generally, I think that would be a win.
04:55Some of the worst drought in the nation has been in south Georgia and north Florida.
04:58So that's all something to watch.
05:00Here is the precipitable water.
05:02If you took all the moisture in a column of the atmosphere over your head, over the sea surface,
05:07or over parts of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, wherever you are,
05:09and squeeze it out and rain it down, how much rain would fall?
05:13Well, this deeper maroon, the deep rust colors there and into purple and pink,
05:18that's actually more moisture.
05:20So it's not the blue or green.
05:21We're looking at the deep reds where more moisture is present.
05:24The first system kind of drifts west in the GFS world, and we really see a bit of drier air
05:31return.
05:32I'm going to draw that front just to kind of remind you of what we're looking at here with the
05:36GFS.
05:37Remember, that's what I drew at the end of the week next week that would suppress some of this away
05:41from Florida.
05:42That's the GFS.
05:43The European model, different tune.
05:46Remember, this produces that zone of low pressure that kind of spins,
05:50and instead of it going west, it actually comes east and north up into areas around the Florida Panhandle.
05:56Would this be a named storm?
05:58Probably not.
05:59There's extra wind shear here.
06:00But it would bring a big difference to the forecast for the Florida Panhandle, where we need that rain.
06:07And we're going to add to that huge surplus in rainfall since May 1st in Mobile,
06:12wettest May on record in Mobile, Alabama.
06:14So big contrast here.
06:17GFS, next Friday night, drier in Florida.
06:20European, decent rain there.
06:22What's this all mean?
06:23What do we do with it?
06:24From a forecast standpoint, here is our forecast graphic showing a big increase in moisture from south to north
06:30through the first seven days of June, eight days of June.
06:33There are admittedly questions how far east or west this sets up.
06:38But at least for now, if we were to categorize risk,
06:41we are highlighting a low risk of tropical wind and rain for along the Carolina coast,
06:46all the way west into Louisiana.
06:48Bermuda is in that conversation if a chunk of this can break off.
06:50We'll keep an eye on it.
06:51That is your forecast feed for now.
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