00:00In the forecast feed, I want to take us into the tropics.
00:03Here we are September 11th and something happened meteorologically very quietly today at midday
00:09in which we broke a record because we did not have a hurricane form at 8 a.m. Eastern
00:15time.
00:1612Z, that's 12 Greenwich Mean Time, Universal Coordinated Time, on September 11th was the
00:24previous record latest first hurricane formation date and time, and it happened twice in the
00:32satellite era.
00:33We had to wait all the way until mid to late morning on September 11th of 2002 and September
00:4011th of 2013 to find the first hurricane those two years.
00:47And then we had long waits other years in which the first hurricane formed maybe early September.
00:53But in the satellite era, we've never had to wait this long for a first Atlantic hurricane.
01:00There's nothing in the short-term horizon.
01:02I suspect we will have at least one hurricane perhaps off the East Coast or near it later
01:08this month, and I'll show you why in just a minute.
01:10But just worth mentioning, there were two years in the era before satellites in which we had
01:17no hurricanes that we know of, 1907, 1914.
01:20But back then, if it didn't cross a shipping route and if it didn't make landfall, it didn't
01:25happen in our eyes because we had no way to observe it.
01:27Now we don't miss a darn thing.
01:28We name way more storms than ever before because of technology, and it gives us eyes across every
01:34acre of the Atlantic Ocean.
01:36Right now, we are tracking one week disturbance, and we are betting against the organization
01:41or development of this system in the short-term.
01:43We've been highlighting this for some time as a low risk, emphasis on low risk for any
01:49development.
01:51So here we are.
01:52I'm going to take a look at some modeling here, and I wanted to show you just what we're
01:55looking at in the short-term first.
01:57So I'm going to bring myself back up here.
01:58And overall, you can see the bright colors here, areas of spin or vorticity.
02:03There is a zone of slightly lower wind shear here, but it's not quite low enough, and there's
02:08not much of a consolidated area of low pressure that forms.
02:12Early next week here, you can see in this European model, a strong zone of high pressure sets
02:17up over the southeast.
02:19And we really tend to look south of areas of high pressure, south of the, under the belly
02:25of the ridge, as Bernie says, for a possible development area.
02:29And that may end up occurring a little farther south instead of right up against Florida.
02:33So one thing that we can keep an eye on here is moisture as well.
02:38And there is plenty of moisture there.
02:39That's what we have had, the deep maroons, abundant moisture.
02:42This is the precipitable water.
02:44If you took all the moisture in the column above the surface, above the ocean surface or
02:48the ground, and squeeze it out, how much would fall?
02:51And you can see that we have abundant moisture in the maroon, counterintuitively, by the way,
02:56the brown and the blue.
02:58Even the blue is drier air.
03:00And the green is arguably dryish air over the tropics.
03:03So we have plenty of moisture near the southeast coast, but it just doesn't quite organize because
03:09of a hint of extra wind shear.
03:10Here are the winds aloft, and I wanted to point out, let's take you out to Sunday, because
03:16nothing's organizing right now.
03:18This is very strong wind shear for this time of the year over the eastern Caribbean and moderately
03:24strong wind shear over the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas.
03:27Let's go farther out.
03:28It's like a brick wall right across the Caribbean here.
03:32If anything were to organize and make it this far west, it just runs into the paper shredder
03:38with wind shear.
03:40Admittedly, there are times when there's less wind shear over the west central tropical Atlantic,
03:46but in those cases, we just have, at times, modest moisture.
03:53The green, drier air.
03:55So again, it's just one thing or the other.
03:57We have either too much wind shear or too much dry air.
04:00And because of that, I'm going to go back to our graphics just to simplify this conversation.
04:05Here is our map of wind shear right now.
04:09And the deep purple, that is really strong wind shear.
04:12So it's like a huge ocean of wind shear.
04:16And this is just too much of a headwind or tailwind or just too much ambient wind to allow
04:22any tropical waves to organize or hold together if they move into this area.
04:26So because of that, here's a summary graphic.
04:29I'm going to remove my squiggles.
04:31Here you can see we have dry air in patches over the east central tropical Atlantic.
04:38And then strong wind shear farther west.
04:40So again, the ingredients are not aligning for any organization too soon.
04:45To summarize our expectations here, over the next two weeks through September 24th, we're
04:51going to go with a low risk, a low risk of development or impacts in any of these areas.
04:56Things begin to change though.
04:58And I want to show you one thing.
05:00Just, I'm going to give you a quick contrast.
05:0224 hours ago, some on social media really began to generate some clicks, likes, and
05:08shares in an irresponsible way because they began to show one model scenario, just one,
05:15that produced a major hurricane in South Florida.
05:18And then it came up the east coast.
05:20And man, they got some easy, if you try to build a social media following, find the scariest
05:24thing, post it, and it's a terrible forecast if there's no continuity.
05:28But you'll get clicks, likes, and shares.
05:30Thumbs down from us on that.
05:32We don't want to promote that.
05:34Same model, 24 hours later.
05:36Here we are.
05:37There are signs that in about a week and a half to two weeks, we may see development.
05:41Look at this.
05:43Concentrated area of heavy rain, thunderstorms, this would be September 20th, the 21st.
05:48Look at this.
05:49Area of low pressure offshore.
05:50Here we got a tropical storm on our hands a few hundred miles east of Georgia, the 21st,
05:5522nd.
05:55And then this organizes into a hurricane north of Bermuda and way out to sea.
06:00So the message here, could there be an east coast impact?
06:03Yes, there could be.
06:04But it's probably not the best move to post a Cat 3 hurricane hitting South Florida or whatever
06:10that was with the GFS model yesterday.
06:13And I wanted to, so I wanted to show you today's update of the same exact product, 24 hours later.
06:19Here's the European.
06:20What's the European doing?
06:22Well, it doesn't quite produce anything of the same fashion, but we need to keep an
06:26eye out for that area around the central part of the Caribbean in the weeks to come.
06:34Because the conducive pattern that we may see, the GFS takes two separate systems up near
06:40the east coast.
06:41There's another one that follows.
06:42So it could become a more active time.
06:44Nothing urgent, nothing ominous, but we're in uncharted territory with no hurricanes for now.
Comments