lots of convection going off where the broad center of the disturbance is located, hard to tell exactly what is down there. i'm fairly confident that this is a depression, and will probably be a tropical storm on recon, if sat presentation and obs ahead of the system dont have it there by midday tomorrow. also, seems to be progressing northward at enough speed so that i doubt it will fail to phase in ahead of the soon to be coastal low. model consensus still east of florida, but the ones with the best initializations tend to take it very close by monroe dade broward and palm beach counties. should get some weather out of this, at least. the further north it gets, the more shear will impact the system (though baroclinic deepening may counterbalance). short term intensification will determine whether this is a gusty tropical storm or a deepening hurricane when it reaches cuba on tuesday, the florida straits tuesday afternoon, and blasts up by hatteras on wednesday. probably not going to do any purely tropical deepening north of 25N, and it should be up there in just over 36 hours.
for anybody of you who like to ponder things that may happen down the road, the basic setup which has given us this soon-to-be marco is going to persist through next week, and maybe spin off something else by next weekend.
HF 0428z14october