JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – News4JAX Insiders know, from the Weather Authority’s newsletters since July, that it would not be until late August before we would see our next named storm.
This drought that went from July 3 until Sept. 1 is extremely rare — especially given this was initially forecasted to be a top 10-15 all-time hurricane season. That drought ends this week, with Danielle and Earl forming before Labor Day.
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And if the system 91L (over the Atlantic Ocean, east of the Leeward Islands) does develop, it is very likely that we will also have a major hurricane just east of the Bahamas. Yep — that close to Florida.
It is time to review the Weather Authority’s Hurricane Survival Guide. Go through the checklist of the supplies that you may need.
But where will these systems go? Why is the GFS so bad at forecasting these tropical systems? Those who closely follow the hurricane models know that the GFS tends to blow up any tropical system with barely a pulse.
Here’s a great example of the GFS taking a tropical wave to the extreme.
Below is the forecast for the same date, this Sunday, Sept. 4. The images jump around with the various model outputs of the GFS (for reference, there are four per day). You can see just how dramatically the model output shifts.
So the takeaway?
Join our News4JAX Insiders, sign up for the Weather Authority Insider Newsletter and remember rule No. 1 of hurricane forecasting:
- Tropical cyclone forecasts from global models beyond a day or two are futile unless the tropical cyclone has been classified for more than 24 hours. The quality of the forecasts goes up dramatically after that.