Late season tropical development is looking increasingly likely in the Southwest Caribbean Sea mid to late week this week.
The ECMWF and it’s ensembles (EPS) began picking up on the potential for tropical development in the Southwest Caribbean last weekend. And slowly, over the past several days, most of the global model guidance has started picking up on it as well.
Now the GFS, CMC, UKMET, and the GFS and ECMWF ensembles (GEFS and EPS) are all in agreement, forecasting a broad area of low pressure to form over the Southwest Caribbean over the next few days, and develop into tropical cyclone by mid to late this week.
And unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be anything that will impede the development of a tropical cyclone cyclone in the Southwest Caribbean next week. Wind shear is expected to be low, and the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), which promotes upward motion and can aid in tropical cyclone formation during hurricane season, is also expected to be moving through the Atlantic Basin.
As a result of the model agreement and aforementioned factors, the National Hurricane Center is giving the broad area of low pressure that is expected to form a 60% chance of developing into a tropical cyclone over the next 5 days.
If this low pressure materializes and develops into a tropical cyclone (which is looking increasingly likely), it would be named Otto. It is also too early to determine where it would track or how strong it would get. However, the odds of it impacting the Gulf Coast are low at this time.
We will have another update out regarding this potential tropical development Tuesday.
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