Tracking the Tropics: Watching the Caribbean, but no systems to track for a while – NBC2 News

A currently disorganized cluster of showers and storms over the southern Caribbean Sea continues to have some potential of eventually becoming a system before the official start of the 2022 hurricane season.

Its important to stress a named system in the Caribbean is not imminent, any development would likely not even begin until late this week or next and there is no agreement between forecast models on if something will develop (and where it would go if it were to form).

But, because it is now mid-May well need to pay attention to thunderstorm flare ups over the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean as they can sometimes trigger the start of tropical development.

The area were watching this week is north of Central America and northwest of the coast of South America. There is no organization with the activity noted on satellite at the time being, but a weather feature called the Central American Gyre may be what helps to form anything that may develop here over the next 10 days.

The Central American Gyre is a very broad circulation that forms near Central America that can help to organize thunderstorms over the water enough to kick off storm development.

Should the Central America Gyre help to spawn a system this month, it wouldnt be a novel event. Each year since 2015 a tropical system has developed in the Atlantic Ocean hurricane basin before the official start of hurricane season which begins on June 1st.

Some things well be watching over the next week will be water temperatures and wind shear.

At the moment, water temperatures are warm enough for organization, but theres a large amount of wind shear that tropical systems dont like in the upper parts of the atmosphere between Florida and the Caribbean (shown with the bright purple color in the map below).

This means that despite warm ocean temperatures, systems would have difficulty making a move toward Florida today. How the upper level winds change in the next week will be useful to monitor.

Another point well be keeping an eye on is what weather forecast models do with the system.

Though its true some models do develop a storm here, other models do not, and when there is such a giant range in forecast outcomes it offers little confidence on what will transpire.

As we monitor how the data changes, well look for trends and similarities and see if something clearer becomes present from the data.

Summary bottom line:

Whether or not what were looking at in the Caribbean becomes something, its time to brush up on your tropical weather knowledge. Read up with the NBC2 First Alert Hurricane Guide here.

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Tracking the Tropics: Watching the Caribbean, but no systems to track for a while - NBC2 News