Tropical weather
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The National Hurricane Center has just announced that they will begin issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Earl, currently located in the western Caribbean Sea and moving west towards Mexico. It is not expected to affect the Southeast or the rest of the US. You can get more information at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov or at https://www.spaghettimodels.com.
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The water temperature in the Atlantic Ocean is nice and warm, well above the long-term average. But in spite of the warm water, the tropics have been very slow to start producing any tropical storms this year after an early start to the season. In part this is due to the presence of Saharan dust…
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According to Jonathan Belles of WunderBlog, there have been no hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico since September 2013. By the end of this week, this will be the longest streak with no Gulf hurricanes on record, dating back to the 1800s. The last hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico was Hurricane Ingrid, which made…
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The hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University released an updated seasonal hurricane forecast for the Atlantic basin this week, and it shows that that they have increased the number of named storms by one from their earlier forecast. They are now forecasting 15 named storms, the most since 2012. They are also predicting 6 hurricanes…
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Weather Underground’s latest blog post describes NOAA’s recent infographic, which shows the highest 24-hour rainfall amounts in each state. You can read more about it here. As you might expect, the Southeast has the highest record amounts because the heaviest rain is generally associated with tropical storms or hurricanes coming onshore and dumping prodigious quantities of…
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Earlier this week Jonathan Belles at the WunderBlog discussed whether having the record earliest “D” tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean predicted what the activity would be for the rest of the season. You can watch a video and read about it here. Based on his statistics, seasons that are active early don’t really indicate…
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If you are interested in seeing which hurricanes and tropical storms have passed through your area in the past, you should try out the NOAA hurricane track viewer. You can access it at https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/historical-hurricane-tracks-gis-map-viewer. It includes tracks going back for the last 150 years, although areas far from land may be underrepresented because no satellites were…