Notice how around Dolly time the Atlantic got that sort of drugged look (aside from Edouard squeezing in) it gets when MJO flips to positive? It never works out perfectly, but you can see that MJO negative wave advancing... just look at how the western Pacific flipped on a week or so ago, and now the central and eastern Pacific have a pretty solid line of storms and invests. Hernan went off the other day, so in seven to ten after you can expect the Atlantic to have an answer. My guess is that things will flip back on all at once later this week--maybe a line of activity will develop. Latest GFS runs keep trending in that direction. Some of the other models are also showing those subtle signs that they also see approaching activity.
Slightly unnerving side note is that it has also been the tendency (although by no means a sure thing) that the longwave pattern will start to reconfigure into one of those where a big wheelhouse ridge starts powering its way into position in the western Atlantic. Euro has a less emphatic version of this but also seems interested in pushing the ridge westward to where any storm would have a hard time sneaking out to sea without rattling some nerves. With the MJO pulse almost here I'm betting on late August giving us some of that. In a year where most of the season predictions are almost emptying the name list, you've got to think that's going to happen some anyway. The first half of this decade featured a few active years where that somehow never worked out--but that's more the exception than the norm when you finish M or later on the list.
I'll try not to be such a stranger on the site... life hasn't slowed down much for a while.
HF 0915z09august