Johnny wrote:I really don't think this system was meant to be. All mets were bullish with this becoming something in the near term and unexpectedly...shear has gotten ahold of it this morning. Now we have a ULL that could come into the picture in the western Caribbean in a couple of days. It went from very favorable conditions to alot of ifs, ands or buts. This system is gonna have to put on some body armor while making the journey through the Caribbean to reflect the shear....or just staying a hair out of harms way.
Really? ALL mets were bullish? I know many that certainly were not. Conditions with this wave haven't been perfect, just "sufficient" by most people's definition (esp relative to what we've seen thus far this year). The wave has hung out a very low latitude, and dry air and strong shear have characterized the area just north of this wave for the past few days IIRC.
Current wind shear analysis from UWisc shows that the only area with sufficiently-low shear is right where the wave is now, with >30kt shear to it's west and north.
We just don't know enough about tropical cyclone genesis to accurately forecast it. Period. We see this every year, and people get all up in arms about a potential major hurricane from a tropical wave / a system below TD criteria. I'm NOT saying this won't develop, but as many have said in the past few days -- just take a breath! We don't know if it will or not. It may be a Cat 3 in the Gulf, or it meet the same fate as many other tropical waves have this year. We just don't know in this case. Sometimes we can make educated guesses a little farther out (like if the entire area is forecast to contain very strong shear in 24hrs -- we can safely assume that any tropical cyclone will likely be weak and/or short-lived), but that depends on the synoptic environment and forecast.