i keep hearing 'convection is starting to wrap around the center' and 'i can see the spin' all the time.. yet still we still have a big amorphous system with convection bursting mostly east of the center. the center is still at the eastern edge of the whole mass, below the western side of jamaica. folks really just plot the center from the vortex message (it has been erratically bobbing around south of jamaica all day) and you can see that the storm is still lopsided and disorganized. believe it or not the reason the storm isnt intensifying is BECAUSE of all the convection away west. put it in the wrong place and it starves the center of inflow, if the upward forcing is going on elsewhere. the richest inflow in this case is the low level easterly flow... and where is most of the deep (very deep) convection.. east of the center.
system is still the snowball at the top of the hill. once the convection finally starts to 'wrap' as everybody always claims to see (or at least some bursts west of the center, or directly overhead).. then this thing will start to deepen like crazy.
keep delaying that and the storm misses critical guidance connections.. in other words we get a wandering system that doesnt try to phase in. a massive storm that is a forecasting nightmare.
its very unlikely this storm will continue to avoid deepening indefinitely, but not impossible. i must say though, i have never seen a storm in a better position keep refusing to knock out the one stone that causes the mountain to fall.
HF 0105z18september