frances chugging along unchanged from last night. guidance still taking the storm into/near the bahamas late in the forecast period.. insinuating that it will strike the east coast in a week. my take unchanged.. storm will go north of the caribbean islands, strike the east coast on or about saturday, september 4th.. quite possibly in the cat3-4 range.
going to fine tune what i said about td7 and 98L last night... and add two other suspect areas for next week. idea about td7/98L binary action may not be as pronounced as i was reckoning last night.. still calling for it, but the ridge should shift east before they get anything real interesting going. td 7 is deepening and should begin to move west today. may intensify quite a bit before it reaches the coast, as per the level of organization it has attained. didn't move as much as i was reckoning last night, so it shouldn't quite get the landfall position i progged just eight hours ago.. somewhere on the sc coast though. should landfall at a high angle late sunday.. perhaps early am monday.. thinking around fripp/edisto at this point. may be a minimal hurricane, but probably a high end tropical storm. should be moving erratically at that point as it interacts with the tropical system passing by to the northeast. based on the forecast pattern it may get 'stuck' instead of carried out to sea.. though models trending less in that direction now.
98L i'm going with development.. later today. no dvorak #s yet.. should change soon. think tropical storm potential.. probably low to mid range... at least through monday. unless more of the ridge periphery sticks than forecast, it should break through and clear hatteras by a couple hundred miles. still going with this as the sacraficial recurvature lamb.
new area of interest appearing in some modeling in the northern gulf for mid week, upcoming. the shortwave energy currently over the southern plains should have a significant piece left behind (trough splitting is the name of the game in this pattern). in other words, there may be another spin-up system near the louisiana coast in early september.. models vary on how far south this feature will be released.. if it gets a decent distance offshore development chances will be present more than if it is hanging over the delta.
the surface flow that helped frances close off a few days ago continues in a weaker form.. wave energy is out of sync behind the system, but global models are consistently developing at least one new tropical cyclone out there during the upcoming week. hard to ID the perp.. as things are so out of whack.. both the spread system near 28w and the one emerging today are potential developers down the line. it's longtracker season, so we should get a few more out of there during the coming weeks.
put a forecast challenge up at oh-dark-thirty last night in the storm forum. big players out there right now, head on over and see if you can reason out their moves.
HF 1243z28august