Well, old Invest 98L is now our new 99L.

Not going to beat a dead horse too much on this one, but if you go through the past 72 hours of loops, "98L" ran a course pretty much just like one of those shorter-lived east pac tropical storms: vigorous tropical wave comes off central America (rather than Africa, in 98L's case), convection really goes up once it hits water, tropical depression forms - often becomes a storm, starts to hook too far to the north too fast and ends up hitting cooler waters right away, convection wanes and what is left is a very well-defined low-level swirl. 98L could have been any of those short-lived east pac TCs of the past, but was just in the wrong basin.

Invest "99L" is just now crossing the 26c isotherm, and slowly increasing SSTs at or above 26.5 lie ahead. These might be a little more helpful. At least 26c-28c will certainly not be hurtful, as was the 23-24c 98L found itself over. What is really holding the low level swirl back from doing anything more right now, is the extremely dry environment it finds itself in, and this does not look to be changing any time soon. Its best hope in the near term would be to have a fortuitous healthy burst of convection that just envelops it some, and offering a little bit of a cocoon in an otherwise hostile world in which to grow again.

Given that in its weakened state it is now on a mostly west heading, the longer it doesn't really ramp up, but just barely holds in there, the greater the risk it pulls off a recovery closer to land, and doesn't recurve in time, if at all.