00:00In the forecast feed today I want to take us into the tropics. We are almost at, well we really
00:05are
00:05at the peak of the hurricane season. If we were to pinpoint one single day we would say that's
00:09September 10th. But we're in like a five to seven day window right now with typically the most
00:15activity in the Atlantic Basin and it is awfully quiet. We're beginning to break some records in
00:20a few different ways which we will talk about but here we are and as we look at the typical
00:26rhythm
00:27of the season we really see this big escalation and you know about the 50 days around today, the 50
00:36day
00:36window before and after is when about two-thirds of the hurricanes and named storms occur. So here we
00:43are and I'm going to generally if this is September 10th we're right here. We're near the top of the
00:48mountain here for the frequency of tropical systems named storms. Tropical storms are hurricanes in
00:54yellow or hurricanes here in in red and we still have a long ways to go. We still have a
01:00long ways
01:01to go. Really the hurricane season doesn't end until technically after Thanksgiving, the end of
01:06November. But we are in rare territory and just one, if we just kind of dial it into the holiday
01:12that we
01:13most frequently associate with hurricanes, Labor Day. We have had three years in a row now in which
01:19there were no named storms on Labor Day in the Atlantic Basin. The satellite era began in the 60s.
01:27There were no years in the satellite era when we've had the benefit of being able to identify
01:31and name every little storm out there that even doesn't cross shipping routes. If you go back before
01:36the satellite era, if it didn't make landfall or if it didn't cross a primary shipping route,
01:41we probably never knew about it. So we have to go dig all the way down into the database back
01:47to the
01:47late 1930s to find the last year there were no named storms on Labor Day. And if we put ourselves
01:51at 1937, 38, 39, it's possible that there may have been a storm that we would have named today
01:57because now we have satellites to detect these things. So things are very quiet. We're going to
02:02take you to the Pacific in a moment, but I want to begin here in the Atlantic because here it's
02:06just
02:07very, very quiet. We are highlighting a zone here under a ridge of high pressure. Sometimes we talk
02:14about under the belly of a ridge, we can find areas of low pressure that sometimes spin up.
02:20In this case, this is really along a stalled, nearly dead front that's draped across the area.
02:26And there's a new front that's going to come in here and that's going to kind of bolster things a
02:30bit. The front's still off to the northwest and I guess I should draw it a little more faithfully here,
02:35this next cold front. And overall, we're going to be tracking this one as it moves into the eastern
02:41U.S. The chance of any tropical development is very limited. So here we are with a low risk of
02:47any development here from the end of this week through next weekend into early next, the following
02:52week. And if we look at this area here, let's take a look at some of the things going on.
02:58Here
02:58you can see our zone of slightly more disturbed weather and a couple of little fragments of spin
03:03in the atmosphere. If we see any development, perhaps it might be a little more likely with one
03:09of these little bits of energy on the east side of Florida at the end of the week. And then
03:13we can
03:13see a new disturbance in the GFS that actually kind of moves west. But there's some wind shear out
03:19there and there's not much opportunity for these to organize. You can see these little bits of energy
03:24that get carried away in various directions. Here's the European model and this doesn't really spin
03:29anything up. And high pressure begins to settle down over parts of Georgia into early next week.
03:35So the chance of development there is limited. And then we go into the main development region.
03:40Let's go way out. Here we have the Lesser Antilles. So this is kind of the enclosure of the Caribbean.
03:46Here we have South America. I'm trying to draw an essay. They're kind of lost behind the banner.
03:53But I wanted to point out areas of strong winds here. We have strong winds that are inhibiting any
03:59development to the north. And even windows of time where we have some strong winds here. This
04:05is strong winds here for this time of the year. It's kind of like the gatekeeper blocking any
04:10tropical wave from entering the Caribbean from the east as a cohesive storm. That would be the
04:15middle of the weekend. And then into early next week, very strong wind shear across the Caribbean.
04:21And where you don't have strong winds here, where you might find more favorable winds
04:27for development, unfavorable for humanity. But here we got a zone of weak winds. So we're looking
04:32at Tuesday 8 a.m. What's going on out there Tuesday 8 a.m.? Well, this is the precipitable water.
04:39And
04:39keep in mind the color scheme here is a little bit counterintuitive. The maroons are abundant moisture.
04:44The greens are dry air. And here we got a lot of dry air in the area of the main
04:49development region
04:50of the tropics. There are also areas of more abundant moisture, tropical waves that move west.
04:55But they run into the chipper shredder, or the paper shredder, I should say, with that strong wind
04:59shear. So because of this, we're going to go back to our graphics just to simplify the story.
05:05And here we are with our wind shear. This is the current wind shear over the tropical Atlantic. And again,
05:13the main development region, approximately this area here. And look at all this deep purple,
05:17that strong wind shear that would disrupt and inhibit any storm from forming. The winds are just
05:24inhospitable there. So they would prevent a storm from organizing. And then where we don't have much
05:29wind shear. Remember, I highlighted that area a little farther east. We've got some dry air on the
05:33northern fringe of the main development region, dry, dusty air. So if you go back to the beginning of
05:39the hurricane season, even before it began, when Alex Da Silva and Paul Pastelok and Nick Arman and other
05:46members of our forecast team and people who specialize in tropical forecasting and long-range forecasting,
05:51they talked a lot about El Nino. And this is strongly correlated here. During an El Nino year,
05:57in fact, I'm going to play this graphic here, we see lots of activity in the Pacific and stronger wind
06:03shear that disrupts flow and less activity because of stronger wind shear. These things run hand in hand.
06:10So the status of ENSO or El Nino Southern Oscillation is right now, we're getting into
06:16rare territory with an exceptionally strong El Nino continuing to build. And the correlation here is
06:22warm water along the tropical Pacific along the equator that correlates with more activity in the
06:28Pacific. And there's a downstream correlation there that leads to more activity in the Pacific and less
06:35activity in the Atlantic because we're looking at more wind shear in the Atlantic basin. So in the
06:42Pacific here, we've got the potential for more development here. And we'll close with a look
06:46at the current status in the Pacific.
