Sheared

Overnight, Chris became rather disorganized.



The image above is from about 5 AM ET this morning. The image shows the convection (thunderstorms) near and to the west of Puerto Rico. The swirl of clouds due north of Puerto Rico is the low level center of Chris. Essentially, shear from the north has decoupled the convection from the low level center. If one were to loop these images in time, one would note that the low level center is moving toward the west-northwest, while the convection is moving toward the southwest. Central pressure has risen to 1010 mb, and maximum winds are set at 45 MPH. There is currently a plane in the system.

Tropical systems decouple all the time; most recent example is Hurcn Jeanne in 2004. I distinctly recall the low-level center of that system moving to the west while the convection stayed to the east. Unfortunately, that system was able to recover and eventually make landfall on the Florida east coast. Not saying Chris is going to hit Florida; what I am saying is that Chris isn't necessarily dead yet.

So, what's next for Chris? No one is really quite sure what will happen next. Options are for the low-level center to fire up some thunderstorms, or for the cluster of thunderstorms to generate a low-level center. My guess would be for the latter to occur. I think the low-level center is in a poor environment (dry air, shear) to initiate very much convection. The cluster of thunderstorms is in a slightly better environment (not as dry, but still sheared). Currently, it would appear more likely that Chris would weaken (and possibly dissipate) than strengthen.

Models in this case are again less useful than usual. It took about 2-3 days for the global models to finally figure out where Chris was, and then Chris went ahead and had it's convection sheared off. A small subset of all the hurricane models have been consistently forecasting dissipation; these models continue to produce this forecast, which doesn't seem as far-fetched as it did earlier in the week. The NHC forecast track has Chris spending most of Sunday over central and western Cuba before emerging into the Gulf. If (big if) Chris makes it into the Gulf, it still poses a threat to (most likely) the southern Texas or Mexican coastlines.