In brief: The Atlantic is getting a little busier, but whether anything can legitimately organize is an open question. Plus, we talk about a historic summer in southern New England, the ongoing El Niño hype, and Hawaii today.
Apologies for not posting the last couple days. I’ve actually been working on some new stuff I hope we can use on our sister site, Space City Weather in the coming weeks. If I’m lucky, it will have application here too. Either way, progress on new things!
Atlantic business time?
The Euro, Euro AI, and GFS ensemble have had mid-2000s Flight of the Conchords on repeat, because to them, it’s just about business time in the Atlantic. We have two disturbances worth monitoring. Whether either develops remains to be seen.
The first and most time-sensitive area is Invest 95L, which is located southeast of Bermuda. This one should be no threat to land, including Bermuda at this point. The question is whether it has time enough to organize. I’m leaning no on this one, and if it does form, it won’t get much past depression or very, very weak tropical storm status. This one would be classified as a “throwaway” storm, one that gets a name, tacks on a smidge of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), and dissipates almost as fast as it forms. Sort of like Cristobal.
The more notable area to watch is the wave emerging off Africa today. The NHC tags this one with a 50 percent chance of development. We again see this rather curious split where Google’s Deep Mind model is not at all enthused, while the global model suite and European AI model all want to slowly develop this over the next 5 to 7 days.
Google’s model has done very good this year at tempering expectations, whereas the globals have had their share of false alarms. That means something. And in this case, it would be sensible to keep our expectations low with respect to this system.
A couple notes about this one. First, it’s going to be moving west at a pretty good clip to start. This may disrupt the initial organization somewhat. Second, as it approaches the Caribbean, it appears that the Bermuda high is going to expand westward with it, meaning it may not turn north as quick as some other modeled systems have looked over the last couple weeks. However, the Bermuda high may begin to break down and retreat again next weekend allowing this disturbance to begin to gain latitude and probably turn north and northeast out to sea, but it’s something we’ll keep tabs on.
Again, the environment around the disturbance will probably feature some degree of wind shear and dry, stable air, so we’d classify the development chances as “marginally conducive” at best right now. The El Niño has not gone (and will not go) anywhere, so the root problems remain for systems trying to develop. We’ll keep watch, but again, low expectations here.
Other notes
Speaking of El Niño, if you start seeing strongly worded headlines, contrary to what we usually tell you here, believe them. The hype here is warranted to a point. This is far and away on the way to becoming the strongest El Niño we’ve seen in modern history. What it means for your day to day is obviously more nuanced than a headline or even we can tell you. But the usual El Niño hallmarks will be amplified in the months ahead. Here in the U.S., that means folks on the coasts will want to pay particular attention, as it will likely get stormy heading into fall and winter. Buckle up, California.
And speaking of the coasts… I gotta tell you, since moving to Connecticut last month, it reminds me of Houston. We’ve had north of 10 inches of rain over the last month, and in fact, Bridgeport, CT has a new record for summer rainfall: 2.35″ yesterday puts them at 21.20″ for Summer 2026, surpassing the summer of 1972 (of Hurricane Agnes fame) for wettest summer on record. Impressive to do this without a remnant tropical system.
Southern Connecticut and Long Island have seen north of 200% of normal rainfall since the beginning of July. Islip is sitting at their 9th wettest summer on record. Another half-inch to inch or so may fall before we hit September, so there’s time to work up the leaderboard or pad the stats some more. Wet, y’all!
Hawaii escapes Moke
Most gauges on the Big Island of Hawaii have been calm with Tropical Storm Moke passing well to the south of Hawaii. Still, some heavy rain has fallen in a few spots.
And a flood watch remains in effect through Monday afternoon. Thankfully not as bad as it could have been.
