It's been my impression that models generally don't perform well with tropical depressions. In the sense that the models generally don't handle the relatively weak pressure and small size involved in a weak system. They can be good at picking out possible development, but often start creating systems out of thin air (though you can use those systems to point point *possible* activity).

Once a storm has developed, then the models can perform better with direction and where the storm will end up. TD 9 is a great example of that. The system is being sheared, but the shear isn't killing the storm, in fact, I'd be willing to say TD 9 was and still does have tropical storm force winds. So long as the system has developed storms, and have a good LLC, they're pretty durn hard to kill off unless they run into land or cooler waters. (that's not a scientific fact, just my observations)

Storms can open up into a wave, but that's actually fairly uncommon.

I think the sats are in eclipse or keyholed so we're not going to get a new pic for a little while, but the last fix I had on the center was just a hair due west of the blow up of storms at 3:15. We'll know more in the morning, though I still think it's a tropical storm

-Mark

PS whoever developed this IR-RGB enhanced loop deserves a cookie, it's great, because you can still actually pick out the LLC if you pay attention....

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/DATA/RT/float2-rgb-loop.html