Watching the western Caribbean and southern Gulf of Mexico for next week

If you can, playing the video in HD makes it much easier to see things. The video will play in low quality by default. If HD quality isn't available, then it will be in a few minutes. Let me know if you have problems or questions about the video. Please feel free to ask me any questions regarding what I talk about in the video, or about the weather in general. You can post in either of my blogs or on Youtube. I will do my best to answer.


Please forgive the jumps and skips in the video today. My software sometimes complains about heavy flash content and doesn't get enough CPU time, causing it to stop recording for a couple of seconds at times.

The Atlantic remains fairly quiet overall this morning, though more active than yesterday. Our Caribbean tropical wave is now just west of Jamaica, interacting with a bit of mid-level energy north of Panama, firing some convection in that region. As I have been mentioning over the last couple days, this tropical wave is indeed starting to look a bit nicer as it comes west, and I expect it will continue to look pretty healthy as it comes into the Yucatan Peninsula over the next couple days. It will be drawing the mid-level feature north of Panama with it, but given how far south it is, it won't have much time over water to try to develop. It will, however, be contributing its energy to the Bay of Campeche, where the tropical wave interacting with the monsoon trough may try to form low pressure in that area in 6-8 days. Another tropical wave, currently near 50W, will be moving towards that general area during the same time frame, contributing its energy to the situation as well.

The GFS and NOGAPS are currently the only models that hint at any kind of development. It would be nice to get some more model support, but it is still several days away. The pattern aloft with an upper ridge over the western Gulf of Mexico looks generally favorable for potential development, but we will have to see what we are dealing with when that time comes. The MJO is also forecast to come into phase 1 by that time, supporting upward motion over the western tropical Atlantic. The message here is that the overall pattern favors development, but doesn't guarantee it. We will have to get in close to this complicated situation later next week before we can draw solid conclusions, but the potential is there and has been voiced here for quite a while now. We will see if anything comes of it.

We shall see what happens!