TheStormExpert wrote:Hammy wrote:TheStormExpert wrote:Until I see things change I'm inclined to think another dud season like 2013 is still possible.
Less active than predicted? Possibly. But 1998/99 had nearly identical conditions, and in fact 1998-2002 all had non-stop SAL during July and with the exception of 2000, into early/middle August.
And comparing 2016 and 2013, the waves in 2013 had nonstop shear to contend with as well as such weak trade winds that several stalled out and dissipated before they could even move off of Africa--neither of those are present this year. Nobody expected an active July and quite a few here that were forecasting an active year thought the early part of August could also be quiet.
And tossing this out there, 1984 literally had no named storms until August 29, and excluding Lili (which formed in December) still managed 11/5/1 and such a repeat would put this year at 15/6/1 with what we've had so far.
The Tropical Waves have not been all that impressive up until the one coming off today, if I remember correctly we were seeing impressive Tropical Waves coming off of Africa in 2013 as early as late May.
Outside of wind shear throughout the Atlantic Basin being finally calm enough in several years to support Tropical Development almost everything else at the moment is not favorable for Tropical Development. For things to change they would have to start now and even if they did it could takes weeks to do so.
Again, this is not an indicator because so many active seasons I've tracked had identical (if not worse) conditions even going into the middle of August. The four years mentioned above had tumbleweed wave after tumbleweed wave come off, in a few cases for two solid months, before anything of significance developed. Unlike 2013 the waves are fairly strong coming off--they're simply running into the very typical July dry air.
1998's map only shows the western Atlantic so I'll use 99-01+2012 for comparison.
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sat_ir/9907/99072400.gif 1999, over a week from now. Drier than 2016 and ITCZ further south. Nothing formed until August 18.
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sat_ir/0007/00072400.gif 2000, over a week from now. Satellite image between Africa and 110W, and south of 35, is nearly identical to this year. Not a single named storm had even formed at this point, and none formed until August 4.
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sat_ir/0107/01072400.gif 2001, over a week from now. Troughs and ITCZ both further south than this year, and the tropical Atlantic was far more dead. Nothing formed since early June, and nothing else formed until August 2, in the Gulf--the first MDR system was still a month away from this point.
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sat_ir/1207/12072200.gif 2012, a week from now. High pressure was much stronger and much further south, and thus there was barely -any- convection in the tropical Atlantic. Nothing formed until August 1 and if I recall, it didn't show up in the models at all until about 4-5 days prior to forming.
There's still plenty of time for things to change, we're only in mid-July at the moment. Several very active years had worse conditions for even longer, and don't assume things may not form due to the lack of modelstorms--the models seem to have been vastly upgraded and we've seen no phantom storms aside from a few 1-2 run systems so whatever forms, if it's in the current model timeframe, is likely not being picked up yet (and for reasons I don't understand, the models seem to perform quite differently with the Atlantic than they do with the Pacific.)
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