i've been highly preoccupied for about a week, just took a couple of glances at 94L. it never had a whole lot going for it, because west-east oriented upper shear jets that don't try to split or curl up into upper lows are the bane of tropical cyclones. doesn't help that the surface convergence the thing was generating is way out under the rough shear, with a lot of the convection firing elsewhere. it's all migrating out into the atlantic past the bahamas now, and the synoptic pattern isn't budging.
this upper pattern has held sway longer than expected. right now there's still an upper low stuck in the red river valley, giving east texas a daily dose of rain, with a large upper trough stuck near the east coast. it rained here or near here pretty much every day this week, with the peculiar thing being the thunderstorms coming down from the northeast and north--not the usual for this time of year. until the pattern decides to budge or reorient i can't see much of anything developing. the upper vortices and shortwaves are generally staying too far to the north to undergo hybrid development, and their effect is to produce daunting amounts of shear in the favored june development regions.
the only thing of interest on the horizon is that several of the forecast models (albeit, not all) are showing a weakness in the eastern gulf late next week from a shortwave that snaps off, appearing to close and retrograde. the gulf is warm enough to work a storm out of that sort of happenstance, but a couple more days of models showing this, and a growing bandwagon are still in order to get truly interested. it is the sort of thing you'd look for this time of year, at least.
there's one other thing of late that has me wondering what we're in for this year. global tropical cyclone activity has been on the down low for months. the westpac is having a persistent, non-starter pattern and isn't likely to get much seasonal-scale help with the weak la-nina signature in the tropical pacific, the southern hemisphere seasons were fairly blunt and not terribly active earlier, and the only places that so far seem to have shown any vigor have been the atlantic and north indian ocean. gonu was sort of a freak and i don't know what can be said for it's implications, but with the atlantic so far acting a bit more perky than normal, the eastpac sort of trudging, and the western pacific not doing much of anything to evacuate all that latent heat building in the tropics, i'm wondering if the atlantic is going to take up the job later.
of course, there have been years where global tropical cyclone activity was just inexplicably down (see 1977). normally, though, you'd expect to see some basins really rocking, and others sort of snoozing. seeing the atlantic try to make up for the balance and go hyper-active this year wouldn't surprise me a heck of a lot.
HF 1521z16june