Lead Forecaster Daniel Crawley
It’s November 5th on the calendar and a lot of people this time of the year focus on cold weather and the upcoming winter but we are still officially in hurricane season. The Atlantic Basin Hurricane Season does not officially end until the last day of this month. And sure enough we are looking at a disturbance that might develop in the Atlantic Basin over the next few days.
Area of disturbed weather in the Eastern Caribbean will move northwest over the next couple days and may develop into a more organized system north of Puerto Rico and east of the Bahamas by early next week.
The National Hurricane Center has highlighted this feature with a moderate chance of development.
Synoptic Analysis…
Most of the global computer guidance wants to develop a low pressure by early next week. The American based GFS is the most aggressive with the system, some of that could be a model bias but we have to respect the possibility of rapid convective feedback sometime next week near the Bahamas. The European Model is not as organized and resembles more of a hybrid/sub-tropical feature.
Low pressure begins forming on the GFS as soon as late Sunday night east of the Bahamas. As you can see a ridge of high pressure is located across the Northwest Atlantic which means any feature will be directed toward the west at a slow motion initially.
By Wednesday, our feature begins to intensify as winds to the north of the developing low becomes quite strong. Also another high pressure is moving across the Midwest and into the Northeast US. That keeps this feature going in a westerly direction. The gradient between the high and low pressures will help push stout easterly flow onto the Southeast coastline of the US. For us locally, a northeast fetch will push significantly cooler air in as well.
It’s between Wednesday and Friday where the GFS does its feedback and intensifies this feature. The model verbatim would suggest this could be a low-end Hurricane moving onshore Florida by Thursday and turning toward the Northwest into the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. Should this feature develop the next name on the list is “Nicole”.
By late Thursday, the positioning of the pressure gradient would help pull a deep southeast fetch off the Atlantic and into the Carolinas meaning increased moisture and rainfall for the region.
The European Model is not as aggressive with the tropical development compared to the GFS but the synoptic setup remains the same. Low pressure forms and moves west, meanwhile high pressure to the north locks in easterly winds. As the high move east by Thursday the winds come strongly from the southeast pumping moisture into the Southeast.
Confidence seems to be growing that we will have a good moisture flux into the Southeast the middle to latter part of the upcoming work week. That is good news for us in that the precipitation could help with the ongoing drought. Here’s a look at the WPC projections for the middle of next week…
Once we get into next week keep an eye on the 7-Day forecast to see what kind of adjustments are made!