The recent strong upward burst of deep convection right before the eclipse is saying one thing...but what about the last one?
The cyclone is genereating deep bursts...but with little banding features.
Here is a word-for-word transcript from my homepage tonight. Ernesto has been the most challenging system I can remember tracking...ever.
From Tropical Update:
UPDATED: Monday, 8/28/2006, 12:10AM EDT - This is my 11th year of watching tropical systems from the standpoint of forecaster...as opposed to interested citizen...and I simply cannot recall a time where so many signals were in conflict...with so little information available...with so much at stake.
Ernesto has significant upward potential...it could become a powerful hurricane in the next couple of days given the right track. But to be quite honest...everyone is currently having to guess at the exact center location due to all of the land interaction from earlier today...and deep pulses that may show the center are occurring in multiple locations...and are only providing small clues.
Recon won't be out there for another couple of hours...and we are entering the satellite eclipse period...where satellite imagery is simply not available until after 2AM EDT. Synoptic drops happened tonight but the data show itself until the models come out in another couple of hours.
With no satellite...recon...or other tools such as reliable radar...who knows what will be there when I wake up in the morning? It could be a dissipating cyclone...or an intensifying one that somehow avoided the high mountains of eastern Cuba.
The Hurricane Center still expects this to become a hurricane and ultimately impact south Florida. I am tired...tomorrow will be a long day...so rather than sit up and wait for the picture to unfold...I am checking out for this evening...but I will summarize how this challenging package unwraps in the morning.
I am going to bed...whatever is there tomorrow is there. I will deal with it then.
MW
*shakes head in disbelief* It's like we have to throw everything we THOUGHT we knew about tropical forecasting out the window. We think the storm can't plow through a ridge and yet we find out the ridge is weaker than forecast, and then another ULL pops up pretty much out of nowhere...
