Rookie question

[MomH]

If there is no trough or ridge guiding, pushing, etc. a cane, which way does it go or does it stand still?

Understand what they thought was going to force Wilma East will not be affecting it. Someone 'splain please.
MomH

[Brent]

It goes the way the steering currents go. If there are no currents, then it stalls or moves very erratically.

and the thing that will force Wilma into Florida isn't even close yet... it's still coming. Won't be (here) until Friday Night/Saturday AM.

[Downdraft]

Actually if there were no steering currents at all the natural tendency of the system would be to move northeast because of the Coriolis effect. The earth rotates clockwise and a hurricane is a low pressure system rotating counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere. Natural tendency would be to pull the system to the north and northeast. Hurricanes stall when they are trapped in an area between two or more external forces or their path is blocked by an external force. Because the earth is a ball and it rotates it would not be natural for a spinning system to sit in one spot unless externally influenced.

[ncweatherwizard]

Well, I'll try to answer this with not so many words.
Basically you don't see a situation where you have absolutely no steering currents. You would have no air movement at any level of the atmosphere--not possible. But when steering currents are very weak, it will tend to meander in the direction of those weak steering currents. However, stronger storms do tend to influence upper level wind flow around them, and for a strong storm in weak steering currents especially, this results in random motion within a confined area. Another possibility is to have two very distinct flow patterns that conflict each other; this was the case with Wilma a couple of days ago when the tropical storm was sandwiched between strong flow from the north, pushing south, and weaker flow around the west side of a weaker ridge to the east. The result was a very slow moving storm that followed the stronger steering current for that time. (There's a whole other story that I could go into about storm heights and steering currents )

What's happened with Wilma is the uncertainty with its interaction with a low over the Great Lakes region. There's currently zonal (latitudinally parallel) flow across the Gulf of Mexico in association with troughing in the region. Ridging has retreated into Mexico and is now at the mid-levels. If the new BAM suite and GFDL do pan out, then it will not be influenced by the low, and ridging would be able to trap Wilma beneath it again, thus stalling it--at least that's the take I've got on this. I still don't buy that solution completely though as zonal flow has extended all the way down to the Yucatan Channel.

Ok..I know I just said a lot there, so if you need me to clarify anything, let me know...I tend to leave holes in explanations sometimes.

Scott