Bahamas tropical disturbance

The area of disturbed weather between the Bahama Islands and Bermuda associated with a non-tropical low pressure system remains disorganized today. The amount of deep thunderstorm activity has actually decreased since yesterday afternoon, despite a drop in wind shear from 15 - 25 knots to 10 - 20 knots. There is some hint of a circulation at mid levels of the atmosphere in this morning's visible satellite imagery, but no obvious circulation at the surface. This disturbance still has the potential to develop into a tropical depression later this week. There is still a lot of wind shear for the disturbance to overcome, and none of the global computer models are developing it into a tropical depression. Any system that might develop would likely be steered into northern Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina by early next week.


Figure 1. An area of disturbed weather between the Bahamas and Bermuda bears watching the next few days.

Elsewhere in the tropics, there is no activity worth reporting. Some of the computer models are forecasting that a tropical storm could form north of Puerto Rico early next week, but this is unlikely, since wind shear is expected to remain very high over almost all of the tropical Atlantic Ocean for the next week.

I'll be back with an update on Friday, unless there is a dramatic change. I'll take a look on Friday at the large scale weather patterns over the Atlantic the past few weeks, which have led to a significant reduction in sea surface temperatures compared to last year at this time--good news for those of you in Hurricane Alley!

Jeff Masters