Any MJO cycles haven't had much success in sustaining themselves out in the Pacific; it's a kind of weird oceanic state we're in, stuck in a weak La Nina pattern with a lot of mixed signals across the board. Despite that, the next month looks to feature positive divergence anomalies at upper levels across much of the main development region. SAL hasn't been as big of a problem as in the past couple of seasons, likely due to increased rainfall across the Sahel in Africa this year, though a strong Azores ridge has kept things fairly stable and moving quickly in the Atlantic. Regardless, SSTs have finally warmed to marginally supportive levels off of the coast of Africa. Even without well-defined tropical waves for most of the season, there has been a persistent monsoonal-like trough across the tropical Atlantic for much of the season; this bodes well once we get better-defined disturbances coming off of Africa, as we seem to start to be doing now.

I think we will see a quite active peak in September, with 6 named storms. In fact, I like Ed's "rest of season" numbers for September, albeit with two major storms rather than one. I think we will likely see a quieter period begin toward late September and last into early October. I expect 2, maybe 3 more storms beyond September, with 1 of those becoming a hurricane.

In sum, 8/5/2. That'd bring us to 13/6/3 for the season -- or a couple of storms short of my early-season prediction, which I'm more than fine with.