Tuesday Evening Tropical Update

🌀 Tropical Update: Action in the tropics is picking up; on Tuesday evening, the National Hurricane Center is now watching two tropical waves for possible tropical development. The first wave, the National Hurricane Center says, "A tropical wave located over the southeastern Caribbean Sea is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms as it moves quickly westward at around 25 mph. Environmental conditions could become more conducive for some gradual development late this week over the western Caribbean Sea or over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico

during the weekend." This wave could slowly develop as it moves towards Mexico and become a Tropical Storm.

The next wave is centered a couple of hundred miles south of the

Cabo Verde Islands is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Models are pretty aggressive with developing this wave, first it is rather unusual to already see Tropical waves this early in June. The Main Development Region of the Atlantic Ocean runs from Africa to the Caribbean Islands and is an area where the majority of tropical cyclones form. This area is notorious for producing major hurricanes; Hurricane Fran, Floyd, Florence, Hazel, Hugo, Irene, and many more all came from this area.

For this wave, European and GFS ensembles are trying to develop this system into a Tropical Storm by the end of this weekend and early next week as it approaches the Lesser Antilles. Folks with interests in the Lesser Antilles, the US/British Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico should monitor the progress of this system. It is way too soon to speculate further down the road for the rest of the Caribbean Islands or the US mainland; please be mindful of scary models that will likely be shared over the coming days. No one has a clue what will happen with this wave beyond 10 days.

As we're heading into the tropical season, I thought I would give you a quick refresher on Ensembles. Ensemble forecasting is a method used in Numerical Weather Prediction; instead of one run of the atmospheric conditions, ensembles are run with slightly different starting conditions. Multiple simulations are run, each with a slight variation of its initial conditions and with slightly perturbed weather models. These variations represent the inevitable uncertainty in the initial conditions and approximations in the models. Ensemble forecasting is very helpful, and you can take the averages and see the outliers to understand, how you should best create a forecast.

I'll be keeping a close eye and providing updates as usual. For now, just go on with your daily life, etc.

-Ethan