By: Lead Forecaster Daniel Crawley
Good Saturday afternoon to everyone,
If you have been paying close attention to social media in the past few days, a lot of talk in the weather world has been focused around a tropical wave that has now exited off the coast of western Africa and into the Atlantic Ocean.
Visible satellite image this afternoon shows the feature and just to the northwest is some Saharan Dust. We will have to see if the dust limits tropical development in the short term. Regardless, all global computer model guidance is quite bullish in developing this system as it moves west across the Atlantic Basin. The National Hurricane Center has designated the feature as INVEST 97L which allows for additional model data to become focused on the storm itself.
Forecast Evolution
The purpose of this blog post is to go over the key players that will help influence the forecast evolution over the next seven days. There has been a lot of sharing of deterministic forecasts with this storm in recent days, which serves as overkill when it comes to public consumption. DO NOT get caught up in the chatter going around.
The expectation is for 97L to slowly develop over the next 72 hours, possibly a result of the nearby Saharan Dust and then afterwards intensification could become more significant. The first set of hurricane models ran on 97L shows this happening in terms of intensity.
Once you get beyond Day 5 (Thursday 8/14), 97L looks to be entering into an environment where sea surface temperatures and upper level winds will be quite favorable.
As far as the steering flow goes, it’s pretty straight-forward. A broad area of high pressure is centered in the middle of the Atlantic Basin and will create the path for 97L to move through next weekend. There are signs of a trough that may erode the Atlantic Ridge, near Bermuda but those details for Day 7 are too early to set in stone.
Summary
A tropical system is likely to develop over the next 5-7 Days as it moves west across the Atlantic Ocean. Atmospheric conditions and warm sea-surface temperatures suggest that the storm could become a hurricane by the later part of the upcoming work week. The next name on the 2025 Atlantic storm list is “Erin.”
Foothills Action Network will provide additional blog updates once the short term evolution of the feature takes place. The early evolution will have impacts on computer model data in the long term. Generally speaking, a tropical system exiting off the African Coast usually takes 12-14 days before impacting the Continental U.S. / Bahamas, so there is plenty of time to watch this.
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