A threat

Been a while...I will say I like posting to the blog only once a year or so. However, there is a threat that has the potential to cause much of the east coast of Florida some trouble over the next week. Bottom line is that we're not really sure of the where, when, and how bad, but this is a really good time to begin to check up on all of those hurricane supplies we're supposed to have.

The area of concern is a tropical wave near the Virgin Islands. While the satellite view of this wave is quite impressive, the Hurricane Center folks haven't yet seen fit to classify it as either a tropical depression or storm (next name in the list: Fay). The wave has had a rather hard time organizing over the last three days (shear, dry air) and is really still trying to get its bearings.

Model forecasts of systems like these generally have their share of problems; mostly to do with accurately placing the storm center into the model. If you can't get the storm in the right place at the start, it's rarely gonna be in the correct place later in the simulation. It will take a couple more days before the models have a better handle on the evolution of the wave/Fay.

Given all of that meteorological modeling legal mumbo jumbo, the average model track has Fay skirting along the northern coast of Puerto Rico, Hispanola, and Cuba. Then it makes a turn right as it's tugged northward by a mid-latitude low pressure system, shooting the gap between the Bahamas and Florida, and running parallel to the Florida east coast in 5 days (Monday or Tuesday of next week). The possibility that Fay could turn left (inland into Florida) at any point cannot be discounted, since, at the extended ranges (5-10 days from now) the flow becomes weak, ill-defined, and uncertain as the aforementioned low to the north passes to the east and fails to absorb Fay.

To give you a range of the possible model solutions, we have, in the west, model tracks into the Gulf of Mexico. To the east, we've got a couple of models that take Fay through the eastern Bahamas. Not as big of a spread as we've had in the past (you could probably search the archives and turn up a couple instances of "Texas to New England"), but for now we're right in the middle of it.