TheStormExpert wrote:Well here we are on August 27th just a couple weeks away from the peak of the season with a named storm that is struggling to become a hurricane again after doing so for just one advisory, as well as two invests that do not look too promising when it comes to tropical development due to unfavorable conditions, and an area of disturbed weather in the NW GoM expected to move inland with no development due to unfavorable conditions and proximity to land.
Just by seeing this one has to wonder are we really still in the active era that the Atlantic has been in since 1995? It's still too soon to say but we should know more by the end of this season or at the very latest the end of the 2017 season. My amateur guess is currently we are no longer in it but others have also stated that this active era is known for it's lack of slow or dead seasons so it may take a few more years to really know if it just and downward spike before ramping up again or is this really the end.
There is a chance we could see a long tracking Cape Verde hurricane coming off Africa Wednesday according to the GFS & Euro but we shall see since original thoughts were that Gaston too would have been one of those type of storms which we have not seen in the Atlantic in YEARS.
I'll agree with 2017 likely being the telling year--been saying since it became clear that 2015 would be a near-record El Nino, that we won't know until 2017 as 2016 would still have the lingering Nino effects as shown by the shear--aside from instability (which is probably 'normal' but shows below normal thanks to several hyper-active seasons) everything in the Atlantic is favorable, except for the shear (lingering Nino effects as the tropical E Pacific hasn't cooled enough yet) and the fact that the MJO is stuck in the WPac (which has literally nothing to do with the multidecadal cycles). 2016 was always going to be 50/50 as far as whether we'd have a bunch of weaker storms or a bunch of ACE pumps.
This season could still be similar to 1985 if the Euro plays out with 99L (which is questionable at the moment) but it could also be another 2001-type year, and that year we went all the way to September 1 having had only four short-lived tropical storms weeks apart from each other (and interestingly was also a year in which nothing occurred in July.)
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