After Hurricane Melissa's record-setting destruction in the Caribbean, could there be another storm this hurricane season? AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish explains the odds of tropical development in November.
00:00It's time for tonight's forecast feed with Jeff.
00:06In tonight's forecast feed, we're going to try to sniff out if there's any more trouble in the Atlantic Basin on the hurricane horizon here as we enter eventually the final month of the hurricane season.
00:17Remember, it does go until the end of November. Thanksgiving feels like it's a long way away when June 1st is here and we're talking about the front end of the hurricane season.
00:26But it is a marathon and we often do see some storms linger and develop even in the month of November.
00:32So what does this look like?
00:33So we take a look at a quick recap of the season.
00:36You can see we've had a pretty decent amount of activity.
00:39The unusual thing, a couple of unusual things that we had this year.
00:43One, that we did not have any storms from the end of August into mid-September.
00:48So we got into a record stretch, tying a record long spell right at the peak of hurricane season.
00:54But another thing that's been unusual, you know, for the longest time we were talking about how there were no actual Caribbean hurricanes.
01:01Unfortunately, the one true Caribbean hurricane is one that will be remembered for centuries in Jamaica.
01:10As, again, a true horror of a Category 5, tying the record from 1935 from the Labor Day hurricane that moved through the Florida Keys.
01:19Again, a tenacious 185-mile-per-hour max sustained wind landfall, 892 millibars, one for the books, tying the record first storm this strong at landfall since 90 years ago in 1935.
01:33Most of the storms have been offshore.
01:35Chantal, the only U.S. landfall.
01:37It was a storm that was kind of hidden in the news behind the Texas flash flood disaster along the Guadalupe River on July 4th.
01:45But there was some significant flooding. It was a billion-dollar disaster with flooding in Raleigh there with Chantal.
01:50And then we also had some other major impacts offshore, including Aaron staying far offshore.
01:55But we had some very significant coastal flooding and erosion from that.
02:00So if we do see another storm, its name would become Nestor.
02:03But we're getting late in the season here.
02:05So here we are around the 30th of October, and you can see this is behind us here, this part of the hurricane season.
02:13So what remains is, again, the remaining tapering off here, but it's not over yet.
02:19And as we remember from 2020, we had two Greek-named storms that were brutal in Nicaragua and Honduras.
02:26They can still happen this time of the year.
02:28So let's take a look at some tropical breeding areas here into November.
02:33In fact, I'm going to zoom this guy in here a little bit so you can see with a little more clarity.
02:37The early November storm tracks typically, at least the breeding areas where we see storms form in early November,
02:44they can form in the open water of the Atlantic.
02:47Sometimes the western part of the main development region is still open for business.
02:51But one thing to consider, the westerly winds, those southward-moving steering winds that are way to the north in the early part of the hurricane season
03:02and mid-season, they're way up near the Canadian border, they begin to shift south.
03:06And therefore, instead of storms that move east to west into Florida, we begin to see the westerlies dominate the steering flow.
03:13We saw a little hint of that with Melissa.
03:16Once Melissa got to a certain point west, remember, Melissa then began to move northeast.
03:20So it wouldn't move into the gulf at this point because those westerly winds are becoming a little more influential.
03:26That's early November.
03:27Mid-November, what begins to happen is the water begins to actually cool down.
03:31We still have those southward-moving steering winds as the jet stream becomes more pronounced farther to the south at times.
03:39More wind shear shuts the gulf generally off.
03:41But we do sometimes see storms move east to west, or if they're far enough north, they could be southwest to northeast movers that generally favor a track that does not typically impact the U.S. east coast.
03:54So are there any areas where we can say with confidence, we're done for the season?
03:59The answer to that probably is yes for Texas and Louisiana.
04:03Look at the wind shear out there.
04:04And really, frankly, this map has changed a lot in the Caribbean and points east at times over the past few weeks.
04:10But we've seen a lot of wind shear on a somewhat consistent basis for Texas and Louisiana for the better part of the last month.
04:17And, again, we wanted to be pretty confident in things before we actually kind of close the door on activity in those areas.
04:24But we wanted to talk about wind shear.
04:26Wind shear is the big driver here.
04:27When you have weak wind shear, you can see the stack of pancakes, as Alex Da Silva says.
04:32It's vertical.
04:33That can allow these storms to be intact.
04:34When we get strong winds aloft this time of the year, especially wind shear increases, that keeps these storms lopsided, and it will prevent them from organizing.
04:42So because of the wind shear, we got green on the map.
04:45The hurricane season has likely ended for Texas, Louisiana, and the coast of Mississippi, and probably the coast of Alabama as well.
04:53So in the short term, we have some concerns there up into the Canadian Maritimes.
04:56But we want to talk about the potential for gyres.
04:58Tropical development can still occur.
05:00And we're kind of sniffing out a little bit of trouble here with the concept of a gyre.
05:04A Central American gyre here could organize in one to two weeks.
05:09So this is where we often see early and late season development.
05:12And if a small zone of low pressure can focus here, sometimes they move north, sometimes they move west.
05:18They're a little more likely to move west this time of the year.
05:20That becomes an area of concern.
05:22So the Tropical Tracker features that through mid-November, if we have any trouble, if there is a nester this year, it would probably come from this general area.
05:31So let's take a look at some models here.
05:33And just taking you farther out there, there goes Melissa out to sea.
05:36And overall, we'll be watching.
05:39Watch for the development of a ridge of high pressure here over parts of the northern Caribbean or the western Atlantic here.
05:47That becomes an area of some modest concern.
05:50So weak, high pressure to the north.
05:54And you can see some high pressure up this way.
05:56But under the belly of a ridge, look at this.
05:58A little zone of some low pressure beginning to form.
06:01This is the kind of thing we need to keep an eye on.
06:03Here you can see the little wind contours, the wind barbs.
06:07That's one depiction.
06:08Here's the GFS.
06:09Here's the European.
06:10Kind of similar with overall.
06:12A little bit of a disturbance that could begin to spin up here down over the central Caribbean.
06:17With a little bit of a closed contour here.
06:19Just something to keep an eye on.
06:20If we have any trouble later this month, in the next month, that's where it would be.
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