Invest 95L – a hybrid disturbance the NHC, I and many others have written off over the last couple of days – could now quickly generate into a tropical storm, the National Hurricane Center said in a special Tropical Weather Outlook:
DOPPLER RADAR AND SATELLITE DATA INDICATE THAT SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE COULD OCCUR ACROSS TERREBONNE PARISH…ESPECIALLY IN TERREBONNE BAY…LATE THIS AFTERNOON AND EARLY EVENING AS THE SYSTEM MOVES ONSHORE.
The NHC gave this system a zero percent chance of development just six hours ago. Now, it is a sixty-percent chance. Should Tropical Depression Two develop (and possibly Tropical Storm Bonnie) just prior to coming ashore in Louisiana, it will put some unnecessary heat on the NHC especially given the current oil situation in the Gulf of Mexico. As I wrote in a previous post on the development of Hurricane Alex, the NHC has no wiggle room. If they blow a forecast of a cyclone in this region, they will be bashed severely. Though, if this system should develop, it would not cause any substantial delays in the relief efforts at the Deepwater Horizon accident, many people will argue next time “we may not be so lucky”. I’m not bashing the NHC; again, I did not see a single meteorologist call for development of this storm. That’s from the likes of Weather Underground and Accuweather, just to name a few.
Should the system quickly spin up to become Tropical Storm Bonnie, it will not be a first. Tropical Storm Allison which caused tremendous flooding to the greater Houston area, was only upgraded to a storm just 12 hours prior to landfall.
