There’s a lot of chatter abound across the WWW this afternoon about a series of runs coming from the EMCWF in reference to a disturbance in the western Caribbean. Joe Bastardi of Accuweather.com has gone on the record as anticipating development for those of you who take his word as gold. Dr. Jeff Masters of Wunderground.com has also expressed interest in a blog post this morning. As does Chris Hebert of ImpactWeather.
However, the topic is flaring on social sites like Twitter as well as the search engines of a possible major hurricane strike along the Gulf coast of Florida next week.
The disturbance itself is currently in an area beneath an anticyclone. However, wind shear is forecast to pick up tomorrow for a short period of time. In which case, will the system even be around?
I’ve seen too many “potential” cyclones that have been destroyed by shear. I’m not about to stick my neck on the line with this one right now (btw, thanks met_grad for the comment). I want to see how it looks tomorrow night. If I’m impressed, I’ll write about it.
The hoopla going around, however, about a hurricane in Florida isn’t without merit. Of course, the prime example of late season monsterous storms would be Hurricane Wilma which recorded the lowest known barometric pressure in the Atlantic basin at 882mb (26.05in). Wilma would develop in the western Caribbean, explode in intensity before weakening just prior to coming ashore in Florida.
I’ll attribute the hype to boredom (why when you have Super Beast Lupit and former Super Beast Rick both threatening land this week?). But, it needs to be mentioned the western Caribbean has yet to be touched by tropical cyclones this year. Which means that water temperatures are extremely warm and OHC is dangerously high. Should a system emerge from the shear blast fixing to take place, things could get very interesting in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico later this week and next.
In the meantime, calm down boys. If we forecasted every disorganized glob of convection in the Atlantic we would have tripled 2005’s seasonal output.
