well... nhc forecast track sort of fits what i was thinking the other day, so just going to roll with it. the intensity forecast is probably conservative beyond 60hrs or so. florida is in for a shellacking fri-sat, but probably nothing compared to what folks along the northern gulf coast will get mon-tue next week, if the forecast track verifies. some of the gfs clusterbrain type models have it stalling over florida then moving NE off the east coast now.. but i'm not buying that at all. spurious low/trough is shown east and northeast of the system.. and i think they're trying to take it up baroclinically/recurve the hurricane by overdoing its height field dent. but anyway, the primary should probably be close to where the track is shown.. somewhere from dade up to martin county centered near boca raton... as a low-end hurricane friday afternoon. this isn't a huge limb.. early prog is mon/early tue along the central gulf coast btw pcb and grand isle with an early center near biloxi-mobile... as a major hurricane.
for 97L... it's a sheared tropical depression. if that had been a rated tropical storm that acquired that profile.. that's what it would be called. i'd be interested to see what the unflagged quickscat vectors are on the north side. the center is near 16/39... slowing down and being drawn back in by the trailing convective mass. the globals and dynamic models are all taking it abruptly north along 50w. i'm not buying the recurvature yet.. something doesn't look right. think the ridge weakness is too dramatic.. see how the globals are taking it north and stalling it near 35/50? my bet is that it stairsteps wnw/nw.. maybe recurves further east.. or maybe stays weak and gets under another span of ridge.
other basin features:
weak impulses in/near the caribbean have that blotchy/overzealous convective look that goes hand-in-hand with mjo enhancement. they're too close to soon-to-be katrina to do anything, probably.
the wave trailing 97L puffed out in spite of a more moist environment. globals track it, keep it low, generally overdo it. got to see how much signature maintains itself.. it will probably active further west, just may not be the sort of thing to develop much.
anything hanging south or east of future katrina will have to be watched if it persists... the trades are very sluggish in the western atlantic and mjo is making everything more convectively active than it otherwise would be. should be shortwave/coastal low that should peel out off the mid atlantic. once it gets a few degrees east of 12/katrina, the storm should move more or less west as the heights rise in its wake.
HF 0134z24august