Tropical Storm Elsa formed early this morning over the Atlantic Ocean. It is the earliest “E” storm on record in the Atlantic Basin. It is also unusual in that it formed from an African easterly wave, way ahead of when that part of the basin usually gets active. In fact, according to Brian McNoldy’s blog post today, the only other time that happened was in 1933, one of the most active seasons on record. If you are interested in more details about how unique Elsa is, I encourage you to read Brian’s post. He is one of my favorite experts, along with Bryan Norcross, on tropical storms.
The forecast cone for Elsa continues to show it moving rapidly to the WNW across the Atlantic before turning to the NW south of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Cuba. Brian says that the forward speed of Elsa will help to keep it from getting stronger. The cone shown here is quite narrow, but don’t let that fool you. While the path for the next couple of days is fairly consistent between computer models, after that the predicted paths diverge quite a bit. That means we really don’t know at this point where Elsa will go. Fortunately, the forecasts also show that Elsa is not likely to strengthen beyond a Category 1 storm, so impacts from wind will be lower, and the rapid forward speed should also limit the rain at any one spot. Even so, make sure to get ready, because we are just at the start of the season, and you can bet there will be more storms to come this summer, even if Elsa lets us go without much damage.
