Lois,

I respect your opinion, however must differ wholehardedly regarding your take on the Canadian Model. Polar opposite from the 'ol NOGAPS ( sadly neutered for several years now ), CMC strikes me as a tropical cyclone model on "crack" ( no offense to our Hudson Bay neighbors to the north ). To be fair, often times an Atlantic system WILL form and in fact picked up by the CMC model. That said, quite common an occurance would be the other 79 tropical systems forecasted to form by CMC simply only to end up as "ghost cyclones". For whatever the reason, I have found early season and end of season formation picked up with somewhat better accuracy by CMC.

In object fairness, I must admit that CMC has for several runs now been forecasting "the son of Dean" to form east of Florida, and then to slam into Central ( and now Southern Fla ). Up to today, there has been only slight hints of agreement from some of the other models, yet today a greater admission by some other models of at least a significant inverted trough approaching from the SE. Of course on satellite, one cannot deny that what appears to be 14 3/4 vorticity points all contained in one massive high amplitude wave, is in fact approaching 60W with some serious 29C octane fuel dead ahead. Even the European is "hinting" at something around days 6-10 near Fla.

As a fellow "model monger", I too check the CMC each run. I am looking for consistancy of runs, followed by some consensus by the other models, especially the UK and/or European. GFS has started to drop what it was detecting as a developing system east of Trinidad ( and there is a legitimate vort. here too ). Given the outflow shear from Dean, it would appear reasonable that something "could" form in the more convective area farther to the north where CMC is forecasting. Guess a few days to come will prove whether or not this "outlier" model was on to something or not. My guess would be to lean conservatively towards a strong wave to approach Florida in the 4-7 days to come, perhaps with some weak 1010mb spin-up towards the end of the cycle. Now that i've erred on the side of "blah", watch the 0Z runs tonight have four major models bringing the "son of Dean" upon Florida's doorstep!

Andy