Upcoming week - October 31-November 6

[Andrew92]

The following post is NOT an official forecast and should not be treated as such. It is just the opinion of the poster and may or may not be backed by sound meteorological data. They are NOT endorsed by any professional institution or storm2k.org. For official information, please refer to the NHC and NWS products.

Evaluating last week

It was all about Hurricane Rina this past week. This was a very low-confidence prediction, and to be fair I was off on timing of intensification primarily. However, there were some victories to take from this storm as well. For one thing, I did a great job on the early to mid-week part of the track, and timing of it. I predicted a slow track to the west-northwest until Wednesday, followed by a gradual re-curve before clipping the Yucatan Peninsula on Friday. Rina did make very slightly west of where I thought and the center briefly came onshore in the Cancun area on Friday, but not nearly enough to affect my performance significantly. As for intensity, I was dead-on in terms of the range for peak intensity, calling for somewhere between 105-120 mph, and it peaked at 110 mph. You look at those things, and I definitely got a fair amount of Rina’s prediction right – and nailing peak intensity for a storm like this is always commendable.

My issues with Rina were the timing of that intensity, along with what happened after Friday. I thought Rina would only intensify gradually, but decided to quickly become a hurricane on Monday instead of Wednesday. I also predicted the peak intensity would happen on Friday as she reached the Yucatan, but it happened on Wednesday instead. Instead, Rina was a tropical storm when she came onshore near Cancun, and a very disorganized one at that. Lastly, the weakening trend was much faster than I anticipated, and I never would have predicted dissipation as early as Friday in the Yucatan Channel. Perhaps if I was doing this week over I could have seen it happening near Cuba on Saturday, but not where and when it took place. Still, the Euro almost perfectly nailed that part of Rina day in and day out, so I probably should have looked into it a little more.

A well-executed track, pinning the timing of landfall and almost the exact location to the dot, and nailing what the peak intensity would be were all big plusses with Rina’s prediction. The timing of intensity is the only significant issue at hand, and probably is to blame for my Friday and weekend woes with this storm. Still, for looking that far out with a storm so hard to predict, this was not a bad prediction at all. Oh, and there’s that matter of correctly predicting no development for Invest 97L, and nothing anywhere else in the Atlantic. I give myself a B for this past week.

And we are breaking into a new month this week! Traditionally, one of the quietest, if not the quietest, during a normal hurricane season (meaning, that doesn’t feature pre-season or post-season action). Here we go!

Current situation and models

The National Hurricane Center is not showing any areas that are threatening to develop in the next 24 hours. Looking at models for this upcoming week, no reliable models are foreseeing anything either during this next week. Dry, stable air continues to rule the roost in the tropics as evidenced with Rina, and there is no reason for that to change this upcoming week. With fronts also causing things to be much less favorable as time goes on into November, not even the warmest waters will probably be enough to get a storm going into much of anything, if that even.

Recent history

The following storms have developed this upcoming week since 1960:

Inga in 1961
Jenny in 1961
An unnamed storm in 1964
Lois in 1966
An unnamed storm in 1969
Subtropical Storm Delta in 1972
Katrina in 1981
Klaus in 1984
Florence in 1994
Noel in 2001
Paloma in 2008
Ida in 2009

That’s twelve storms for this upcoming week in the past 50 years. Surprisingly, nine of these went on to become hurricanes, though only Paloma became at least a C3 storm. Florence was in fact the only other storms to become at least a C2 out of this data set. Inga and the 1964 storm were two of the ones that failed to become hurricanes, and both were close to land in the tropics; Inga in the Bay of Campeche, and the 1964 storm in the western Caribbean. Delta was the other one to fail to gather hurricane intensity, and it stayed far away from land. When looking at the other storms, Jenny, Lois, the 1969 storm, Florence, and Noel all stayed far away from land. The other remaining storms, Katrina (again, not the famous one), Klaus, Paloma, and Ida, all formed in the Caribbean. Klaus formed in the eastern part, while the others all formed further west.

So what does this all tell us?

The historical odds and the current odds both say it is pretty unlikely something would develop this upcoming week. I think if it were to happen this year, it would probably be somewhere in the subtropics far away from land. The reason? Well, no reliable models are picking up any tropical developments this upcoming week. However, none of them seemed to pick up storms like Bret, Cindy, Franklin, Gert, or Jose earlier this year, which all formed in similar locations from similar origins. If something were to develop, the odds seem surprisingly high for something to become a hurricane. But this has also been the year of underachieving storms, so that probably wouldn’t seem to likely either, especially with all the stable air in the Atlantic that has refused to abate. When you couple that with more fronts causing even more unfavorable environments for tropical developments, it will be quite a task for anything to develop tropically anywhere this upcoming week in the Atlantic.

The Prediction

I’m going to make this one short and sweet. It’s just too hard for anything to get going this upcoming week. I predict no tropical cyclone development this upcoming week anywhere in the Atlantic. Confidence is 90%.

-Andrew92

[Andrew92]

Time to evaluate!

This past week was rather simple. I called for no tropical cyclone development, and indeed, nothing even really threatened to develop into anything tropically this past week. Not really a surprise given that it is November now and the hurricane season is winding down. There is an interesting area of thunderstorms not far from Bermuda that has sparked the National Hurricane Center’s interest, but it is still a day or two from developing. Therefore, I give myself an A for this past week.

New week coming up shortly.

-Andrew92