Our two features aren't looking anything like they were late last night and into the first half of Thursday.

The mid-level circ in 99L is easy enough to spot tonight, with most of the deep convection, most of just about any convection, now removed. So, looks like if one is to track this as a coherent feature, which it is, I look to 14N 71W as the new starting point. As has been pointed out by many others, this puppy is on a tear.

If there was a closed off surface low today, it looks to have been inland over northern South America. Pressures in Aruba were markedly lower, and quite a bit of the deep convection looks to have been excited out that way, at the very same time 99L was shedding away convection as if it was layers of clothing on not only prom night, but prom night on the last night before the day the world ends.

I might be going out on a limb a little, but it does appear that the mid-level circulation is still enough intact, and upper-level outflow is still occurring, that should 99L possibly hit a sweet spot between here and central America, it could maybe still pull something off. A little burst of convection under that apparent MLC's center at this hour. I wouldn't even hold my dogs breath for anything to come out of it at this time, however.

The surface trof in the GOM does look to have closed off a very weak surface low in the northeast corner, but more and more today this entire feature has looked less and less potentially tropical, and more and more simply extratropical with a slug of tropical moisture wrapped up into itself.

Models still suggest that a warm core low could pop up either just south of Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi, and/or also just W of central Florida. Sure looks like it has tried to do so in both locations, but upper-level winds over the entire surface trof have shifted from anticyclonic, to cyclonic, lending even more to that extratropical side, and far less to the tropical.

Early August. Based on 1944-2005 as a representative sample, the second named storm of a season doesn't form "on average" until August 6, and the first hurricane doesn't get called until August 14. We shouldn't be all that surprised if two features, which certainly looked rather promising, still don't end up pulling it together at this point in a season.