Opportunity for tropical development near Florida/S.E. US increases by this weekend

Good Thursday afternoon,

The weather world has been keeping an eye on a tropical wave that has moved across the Atlantic Basin over the past week. It is currently located near Hispanola moving WNW. The interaction with land right now continues to prevent this feature from quickly organizing but that will change as we go into this weekend.

Looking at the 500mb charts you can see an upper trough that will be centered over the Appalachians Saturday, that is the feature to make our local weather remain active. Meanwhile the upper level energy associated with the tropical wave will be centered near western Cuba by Saturday morning.

It will be later Saturday and into Sunday when this feature will be in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and away from any mountainous terrain that has been serving to disrupt the flow near the surface.

Here’s a look at the hurricane models and they go along with the idea of a storm track through Sunday…

While the storm is expected to be located in the Gulf on Sunday, upper level winds that help to ventilate tropical systems will be sufficient enough to where intensification could occur. Given the extremely warm sea surface temperatures and the lack of strong shear aloft, the development of at least a tropical depression if not a tropical storm (would be named “Debby”) is expected.

The biggest conflict with the overall forecast is what starts to happen early next week as a possible “Debby” could be located somewhere near the Gulf Coast of Florida. The trough over the Appalachians has lifted out with heights rising across the Mid-Atlantic Region, however the trough from all indications does NOT capture the Gulf feature. The end result is a steering flow that weakens significantly leaving the possibility for this low to either slowly run parallel to the Southeast U.S. Coastline or possibly stall out completely anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to the Georgia/South Carolina Coastal Plain.

The Bottom Line

We could be looking at a scenario by early next week where a tropical low could be very slow moving delivering a lot of moisture for some coastal areas from South Carolina down to the Florida Gulf Coast.

One of these three options appear possible at this time…

Option 1: Tropical Storm Debby forms this weekend in the Gulf, makes a Florida landfall sometime late Sunday/Monday and moves up through coastal Georgia and South Carolina for mid-next week.

Option 2: Debby forms and begins to take on erratic motion near Florida Panhandle by Monday before eventually moving northward toward the inland areas of the Southeast U.S.

Option 3: Debby forms, stalls and then strengthens significantly producing a catastrophic flood event for Florida.

If you have vacation plans for this upcoming weekend and next week, please keep an eye on latest forecasts. No reasons to cancel anything right now, especially the Carolinas/Georgia.