MJO has become redefined this month, with a fairly solid wave propagating east right now. the enhancing zone has already crossed the dateline. it could be that the new eastpac system is a precursor to an oncoming active stretch. the wave in august washed out before getting to our part of the hemisphere (it was probably damped by some other factor), and this one could also... but if this one makes it, we'll get an mjo pulse in the atlantic during a hyper-active year.
the entire basin is open for development this time of year, but the eastern atlantic usually doesn't do much after the third week of september. it looks like the far cv region will shut down shortly.. it has already been impinged on by upper troughs, prematurely. we've got what's acting like a persistent positive nao, which favors zonal ridging.. with negative pulses... this is the pattern that enacted in july and gave us all that activity. it also favors low-trajectory tracks in the deep tropics that get storms further westward.
then there's the ensemble means themselves. they've been showing increasingly zonal ridging in the eastern u.s. for some time.. this has verified so far. what we'll have in the next couple weeks, if it verifies in the future, will be a pattern that favors tracks into the gulf and eventually to the southeast coast. add to that, late september/early october is when the favored development zones shift to the western caribbean.
all of this adds up to renewed peril on the gulf coast, is what i'm thinking. perhaps something like what happened in the fall of 2002, only not in an el nino year.
HF 1319z12september