xtyphooncyclonex wrote:A few hours ago, there were conversations saying they wondered whether Beryl would even be a powerful storm over Jamaica or after that. Now these have shifted to whether it would be a 3 or 4, and later to "Beryl has barely weakened at all."
I also wonder what the implications of models significantly under-initializing Beryl would be in later days.
Beryl just keeps defying us...
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Obviously there are factors that work on a tropical system that we haven't figured out how to quantify yet.
Steering currents, highs/lows, shear, etc. are all things that I never remember looking at many decades ago. Maybe prof. mets did, but they didn't tell us (the general public) about them!
I can remember many years ago, when a TV Met said, "When you want to know where a storm in the Gulf is going, look at the weather coming in from the Pacific on the west coast. That will be steering the system in a few days. I thought that was the most AMAZING idea I'd ever heard!!
Now look where we are. "Steering winds aloft," ridges, troughs, shear, el Nino, la Nina, SST and on and on are all taken into account when prognosticating a storm nowadays....
Huge new findings all the time.
Cleo - 1964, Betsy - 1965, David - 1979, Andrew - 1992, Charlie (Francis, Ivan, Jeanne) - 2004, Irma - 2017, Ian - 2022