Matt Lanza

One-sentence summary

While tropical development is not expected over the next week or so, there are a couple features to keep tabs on in the Atlantic.

Happening now: Watching the Atlantic

After the weekend, we start the second week of July off with a couple items of note in the Atlantic. Just to be clear here, we aren’t necessarily expecting anything important to come from this, but given the warm ocean waters, it’s not the worst idea in the world to keep an eye on things.

Let’s start with the current picture of dust and disturbances.

You can see a pretty healthy area of dust stretching across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean islands. Surely not the most impressive we’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely there. Anyway, most of the dust stretches across 20°N latitude until you get close to the Caribbean. Underneath that band of dust is a tropical wave. This has shown flashes of coherence through the weekend, and the European ensemble model in particular has at times latched onto this becoming A Thing over the next few days. Frankly, it’s hardly impressive looking today, likely battling some of the dust on its periphery and running into a wall of shear on its west side.

Modeling has gotten a good deal less excitable about this wave, so I don’t think it merits close watching, but we’ll see how it goes over the next day or two.

The medium range (days 6 to 10): Watching the far north Atlantic

Outside of that disturbance above, we had mentioned last week that the far north Atlantic might see some noise this week. Indeed, we have a pair of disturbances sitting up there. An actual surface low should develop in the coming days from the smaller area of storms at left on the image below (exiting Bermuda) and we may see this area become a development one.

The National Hurricane Center is assigning about 30% odds for that to occur. If it does happen, the system would likely meander somewhat incoherently, as if it were 2 AM and last call around the North Atlantic generally toward the Azores over time. We’ll see if it become a threat to those islands. For now, we’ll say this is not a big deal but does bear a little watching.

Fantasyland (beyond day 10): Mostly quiet

The good news is that despite the slight uptick in “noise” today, the day 10+ period does not look that interesting right now. Not to say that things will not change, but at this point, I’m not seeing much of anything that warrants a lot of our attention.

Sidebar: New England flooding

Flooding in New England is not uncommon. The region has a long history of flooding events, often with remnant tropical systems. But what is expected today, particularly without the involvement of a tropical system is troubling. That region is in line for some serious rain and flooding today, as a pipeline of moisture extends from the warm Gulf up through the warm Atlantic into New England.

The Weather Prediction Center has parts of northern New York and Vermont in their rare “high risk” category for excessive rainfall, which usually correlates strongly to bad outcomes. Significant to catastrophic flooding is expected in parts of New England and New York today because of this setup. Rainfall warnings extend into Quebec as well.

It’s also a good opportunity for us to look at sea-surface temperature anomalies and see just how warm things are right now.

There is hardly any cooler than normal water to be found anywhere in the Atlantic, Gulf, or Caribbean. This is one reason why it’s tough to forecast a slow hurricane season. At any rate, our thoughts are with the folks in New England that will be dealing with a very rough go of it today.

One-sentence summary

The Atlantic remains quiet, with no action expected over the next 7 to 10 days, while the Pacific should see a bit of activity ahead.

Happening now: Remaining quiet

Things remain quiet across the tropics this morning.

We still have disorganized disturbed weather in the western Gulf, but it is basically ashore at this point. The only other feature that stands out is a wave approaching the Lesser Antilles. This should bring showers and storms there, but there is no real risk of development. Another disturbance about halfway across the Atlantic may have a narrow window to develop next week. Short of that, there’s not much doing.

The medium-range (days 6 to 10): Still calm!

All remains quiet, though we expect a system or two to form in the near and medium term in the Pacific. Nothing that is expected to impact land, however.

Fantasyland (beyond day 10): Likely quiet a bit longer

We still do not see any items of note on any of the modeling we use looking out farther in time. The Atlantic may begin to get a bit less hostile toward tropical systems by late month, but as of now, there are no consequences of that potential showing up out there.

Housekeeping!

A kinder, gentler version of housekeeping than the scene in “Tommy Boy” to close out today. Let’s hop through some things.

Seasonal outlook

The fine folks at Colorado State University released their second to last seasonal update for the 2023 Atlantic season yesterday. Somewhat surprisingly, it increased the seasonal totals, by 3 storms, 2 hurricanes, 1 major hurricane, and most impressively 35 Accumulated cyclone energy units (a very consequential increase).

Not that we expected them to cut their numbers or anything, but this was a bit of an aggressive increase. If you read between the lines, the battle between warm sea-surface temperatures and El Niño makes their outlook almost a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. While we feel that this is a bit of a bold forecast, there is a conceivable path there — but we would need El Niño to do something unprecedented in our history, which is to substantially reduce its impacts on the Atlantic. Another possible route to an active season? More activity in the open Atlantic, where the water is way warmer than normal and El Niño’s influence is a little less.

Whatever the case, we are statistically only about 3 percent of the way through hurricane season, when using ACE as a metric. So it is far too soon to write any seasonal outcome off.

July hurricane nuggets

When was the last July hurricane in the Atlantic? You have to go all the way back to 2021 to find one. Elsa, if you may remember due to its memorable name, was the last July hurricane in the Atlantic.

It never made landfall as a hurricane but still caused about $1 billion in damage. The last landfalling hurricane in July was Hurricane Isaias, which came ashore in Brunswick County, NC and managed to cause over $5 billion in damage across the Caribbean, Bahamas, up the U.S. east coast, and in Canada.

The strongest observed July hurricane was Emily in the frenetic season of 2005. Emily became a category 5 hurricane southwest of Jamaica. It made one landfall in the Yucatan near Tulum as a category 4 storm and another in Tamaulipas as a category 3 storm.

Some other memorable July hurricanes?

Hurricane Dolly in 2008
Hurricane Dennis, also in 2005
Hurricane Danny in 1997, which dumped almost 40″ of rain on South Alabama.
Hurricane Bertha in 1996 (which the author fondly remembers going out in when it came through New Jersey as a tropical storm)
The “Surprise” Hurricane of 1943 in Texas
The 1926 Nassau Hurricane
The 1916 Gulf Coast Hurricane
The 1916 Charleston Hurricane
The 1909 Velasco Hurricane

So, yes, storms do happen in July and they can be memorable!

Social media

Without getting into the weeds on all this, we recognize that the social media landscape is ever-changing and seems to be undergoing some considerable upheaval right now. We encourage you to sign up for our email updates to the right (desktop) or by scrolling alllllll the way down (on mobile), so you never miss a post. But, if you do prefer using social media, we currently have numerous accounts established, and we’ll reassess our strategies as the landscape further evolves.

Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
Twitter
Threads (the new Meta Twitter competitor)
Bluesky
Mastodon

On almost all of these, we should be “theeyewallwx” if that makes your life easier.

Please keep in mind…this is a *lot* for us to keep up with, so we will likely be making some cuts once the dust settles, hopefully within the next 6 months. But for now, we’ll do our best to keep up with all these platforms to reach you where you are.

One-sentence summary

We continue to expect a fairly quiet 10 days ahead.

Happening now: Gulf busy, but not organized

Late yesterday, the Gulf of Mexico started to do some Gulf of Mexico things with a weak circulation trying to show up off the coast of Mexico or South Texas. Today that remains disorganized, albeit agitated.

Some eagle-eyed readers may recall the GFS operational model insisting that something would develop in the Gulf about 10 days ago. As is often the case, it was incorrect but had some ideas you could take from what it showed.

I’m mainly writing about this because there is not much else to discuss today. But it’s illustrative! Nothing has come of this one, of course. There has not been any real risk anything would. It will continue to produce scattered thunderstorms over coastal Mexico and Texas today and shift northward tomorrow. But it does underscore how we always like to watch the Gulf during hurricane season. All it takes is one batch of poorly forecast thunderstorms to lead to a surprise outcome. Thankfully, this won’t be it. But if we say “Still, it’s a good idea to keep tabs on the Gulf,” we aren’t just doing it to entertain ourselves!

The medium-range (days 6-10): Nothing

It’s quiet.

Fantasyland (beyond day 10): Nothing, but in purple

It looks as if this pattern of high shear, dry air, and minimal activity will continue deep into July. Right now, we don’t see anything of note out there in the models.

If we look at the GFS ensemble, which is a tweaked version of the GFS model run over 30 times, it seems quiet for the next two weeks. We can’t even really buy many rogue ensemble members right now that spit out anything of significance. That’s good news for us all.

Tomorrow, we’ll fill the void with a few nuggets about July history in the Atlantic basin.

One-sentence summary

We are all clear for the foreseeable future in the Atlantic!

Happening now: The Atlantic is sheared and the Gulf is rather dry

A one-two punch of factors in addition to climatology is inhibiting tropical development across the Atlantic basin at the moment. Across most of the ocean, you have wind shear. That is also present in the Caribbean today. Wind shear acts to minimize tropical system organization in most cases.

The Gulf? Not a ton of shear! However, the Gulf is loaded up with dry air right now, so any development would be hindered substantially by that. There will be moisture reloading into the Gulf this week, but nothing organized should come from that occurring.

These factors are helping to keep any chance at activity in the Atlantic virtually non-existent this week.

The medium-range (days 6 to 10): Shear and dry air continue

The combination of wind shear and dry air will continue to likely impede any development in the Gulf, Caribbean, or Atlantic through day 10. The Pacific will likely continue to stay a bit busy.

Fantasyland (beyond day 10): Slumber party?

We continue to slumber in the Atlantic. The GFS operational model, the 4-times daily deterministic guidance that often produces false alarm storms can’t even really latch on to much of anything out into fantasyland, so we’ll continue expecting a quiet outlook for now. I would not be entirely shocked to see something lower-end or close to home try to form in this period, but really, that’s me going on gut and some high-level model data. But it would seem we may be shaping up for a fairly quiet July.

July climatology & June review

Through the end of June, we have amassed a total of 9.8 Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) units. ACE is a way to gauge individual storm or season intensity. Units are accumulated by summing how long a storm stays at a particular intensity. We can tally those up by storm or by season to get a number to compare to past storms or seasons. Unfortunately, ACE is not perfect, as you are merely looking at wind speed and duration of wind speed. Hurricanes and tropical storms are more complex than that alone. However, it counts for something.

9.8 units of ACE is actually pretty impressive through the end of June. We should be at about 2.5 units. However, that said, an average season has something on the order of 122 ACE units, which argues that we have about 97 to 98 percent of hurricane season still ahead of us from an intensity perspective. Junes are variable and never usually too crazy, and they don’t mean much in terms of what may be coming the rest of the season. June of 1934 was a particularly big month with 19.5 ACE units from one slow moving hurricane off Central America. That hurricane season ended up near average. 1886 was another pretty wild June with 20.6 ACE units when 3 hurricanes developed, one of them hitting Texas and the other two hitting Florida. That season was active. So again, don’t read into these numbers too much.

So what of July? Well, as you read above, we currently expect a mostly quiet month. We will see how that holds up. But, historically, July is often a quieter month in terms of landfall risks.

July is actually a bit quieter on net in parts of the Gulf of Mexico relative to June. There tends to be a little more action in the Caribbean and near the Lesser Antilles. But the main area of activity appears to be off the Mid-Atlantic coast, with storms that tend to form near the Carolinas and shoot out to sea. So if you want to know where you should be watching, there you go. It’s not really until August that things get going, and the second half of August at that. So, we still have some time. It’s as good a time as any to review your personal situation and prepare in case things do get active.

We will take tomorrow off in observance of Independence Day in the U.S., and we’ll be back with you on Wednesday morning!