Long Range and Dreaming

There is a tropical wave currently 2500 miles away from the Florida Straits. Right now the National Hurricane Center puts a mere 20% chance of it forming into a named storm (odds are it would be T.S. Irene).

Regardless of this long range computer models continue to develop this wave into a major storm. Take a look at some of the data from the morning run of the GFS, for the last day it has shown the storm moving up the eastern Florida coast and then into the Carolinas.

The next run showed the storm getting very strong in the Gulf and moving toward New Orleans. This is actually a snap shot of what this run predicts for the last day of August: rain over north Texas from this!

This is a different long range model, the ECMWF. It also shows the storm getting into the Gulf.

Long range forecasting is used to show trends more than a forecast. The trend is for an active Atlantic basin and a storm getting into the Gulf. We will wait to see what happens, if we end up in the direct path of this we could really break the pattern of this summer.