Warm and undisturbed waters

[Brian Stertz]

Looks like if the upper air features setup nicely, the first tropical system ought to have a long fetch of undisturbed and warming waters to organize over. SST's look favorable for the first one to be a real whopper with very little shearing on the ext. forecasts. Anybody have some opinions on this ?

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/DATA/RT/SST/ATL/20.jpg

 

[Jim Leonard]

Brian,
Im sure we'll have at least one big storm by the end of this month. Some of the more active seasons really get going full force by the 25th of August. I think we are setting up for a season with a rapid fire come later this month. The sst's are favorable although not as warm as 2004/2005 but they are more than enough. To get a real intense hurricane the seedling system has to be just right. Storms like Ivan, Charley, Rita and Wilma to name a few gave little signs of that they were going to be as strong as they eventually were. Some storms if they exibit real cold cloud tops surrounding the low center that would be a good clue. Other storms if they are alligned just right with the jet stream to the north as was the case with hurricane Charley you get very rapid deepening. Wilma had similar conditions but the storm was too late in the season and had a much larger core off the west coast of Florida to allow it to go to cat-4 status.

 

[Brian Stertz]

Thanks for the insight Jim....I just was wondering about the thoughts with essentially zero water disturbance so far this summer from the W.Coast of Africa all the way across into the GOM & Caribbean Sea. My aunt was worried about going down to Ft. Myers because of the threat for some bad ones this season. I told her she's probably fine through Aug 20th or so. There after all bets are off. It will be interesting to see how wound up things get this year.