Yesterday I wrote about the effects that El Nino usually has on the Atlantic hurricane season. There have been a lot of questions about it this year, and I decided to make a video explaining El Nino's formation, and how it affects the weather pattern in a way that suppresses hurricane activity in our part of the world. There are many other factors but the ENSO is one of the big ones so it is worth understanding. I had to fit this all into 15 minutes and I had so much I wanted to say, and I'm in a rush this morning so I couldn't revise it much, so I hope I made some sense lol. I know I mixed up my easts and wests again =/ Here's the link to the video. Since it was longer than 10 minutes I couldn't use YouTube so I had to use another site that WU won't let me embed here. Tropical Tidbit from 12:30pm EDT Saturday, July 4th, 2009: There's nothing going on in the tropics. Sure whatever we have Invest 94L but there's nobody out there to care about it. I don't have a problem with the NHC noticing these things and naming them and all that good stuff, but it makes me mad if they don't do it to systems right along our coastline! Like the 991mb low last year off the SE coast with an eye, and like 90L in late May this year. And yet they'll consider naming systems out in the middle of nowhere? It's insane. Anyway if you want to talk about 94L fine. It's in waters less than 25C and embedded in an upper shortwave which means this is never going fully tropical. It tried very hard to go sub-tropical this morning when it tried to get a warm core with convection more over the center as wind shear lightened a little bit. Since then it decided it wanted to self-destruct so naturally the surface low turned tail and ran from the convection! It's now drifting towards the south, but should turn back onto its original course towards the ENE once it's convinced the convection isn't chasing it anymore. Due to its position under the shortwave getting sheared and the old fronts still attached to it, I don't think this will be able to go warm-core, although it's worth monitoring over the next few days before it moves over waters too cold to support STS development. A ship in the area is reporting SW winds of 36mph, so TS-force winds are possible near the center of this system. Heat continues to pile up in the east Pacific and there is now a surface low out near 105W that may try to develop but it has a small window of opportunity before it moves over significantly colder SSTs within 48 hours. There is more stuff behind it that will probably try to develop during the next 10 days. I will still be watching off the Carolinas in 4-7 days for a low forming on the tail-end of a front that will be stalling in that area. Any low that does form will likely be swept out to sea fairly quickly but it will be interesting to see if we can get a system to try to go warm-core along a similar path that TD 1 took. We shall see what happens! Happy Independence Day! Invest 94L model tracks:   Invest 94L Visible Satellite: (click image for loop) Caribbean Visible Satellite: (click image for loop)  |