Atlantic Trying to Heat Up Again as Statistical Peak of Season Approaches

Labor Day is usually the unofficial end of the summer season in the United States. Meteorological fall already began on Thursday. The statistical peak of the Atlantic Hurricane Season is just five days away, and the Tropical Atlantic is trying to pick up again after a busy week last week with three tropical systems.

One of those systems, Hermine is still churning as a post-tropical cyclone off the Mid-Atlantic coast while two disturbances are trying to spin up. Invest 92L, which formed over the weekend, has now moved into the Eastern Caribbean, but is still struggling to develop while another tropical wave has just moved off the coast of Africa. Let’s take a closer look around.

Let’s take a closer look around the tropics this morning:

Gulf of Mexico

Conditions are mostly quiet in the Gulf this afternoon. There are some clouds and showers along the Central Gulf Coast, but almost all of it is over land. No development is expected over the next 24 hours.

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Caribbean

Invest 92L is the only show in town in the Caribbean for the most part. The disturbance, which is a tropical wave, does have winds associated with it going up to tropical storm force, but the shower and thunderstorm activity remains disorganized, and hostile environmental conditions in the form of dry air and upper level wind shear are making things difficult for development.

More details on Invest 92L in the blog. Elsewhere, in the Caribbean, conditions are mostly tranquil with the exception of some clouds in the Southwestern portion of the region near Nicaragua. No development is expected over the next 48 hours.

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Atlantic Ocean

Hermine is the main feature in the basin right now. Although the system is post-tropical, it possesses near hurricane force winds at 70 miles per hour with gusts over hurricane force. The storm is expected to meander off the coast of Eastern Long Island over the next couple of days before moving out toward the Canadian Maritimes later in the week.

A Tropical Storm Warning remains in effect for Long Island and Southern New England. More details in the blog. Elsewhere in the Atlantic, a new tropical wave has come off the coast of Africa some several hundred miles to the West-Southwest of Africa. Low pressure is expected to form with this wave later this week, and environmental conditions are forecast to be favorable for gradual development later this week in the Central Atlantic. Development not expected over the next 24 hours.

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Africa

The latest satellite imagery of the continent shows a lot of shower and thunderstorm activity stretching across the Sahel, or Sub-Saharan Africa from Mali, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone to Nigeria to Chad and the Central African Republic. These showers and storms continue to move westward toward the Atlantic Ocean, and will be the next group of waves to watch in the coming weeks.