Never say never, but it'd be pretty tough to make it back to the west Florida coast from the Yucutan. Opal in 1995 is the closest I can think of, and it formed near the Yucutan and ended up making landfall near where Dennis did the other day.
A storm forming in that vicinity and then moving to the NE is more likely to affect the west Florida coast than something moving west out of the Caribbean out of respect for inertial forces carrying the latter such storm continually to the west. It'd take an unusually strong trough reaching into the Gulf to result in such a path, no matter the storm, and you usually don't see those this time of year. For Emily? Not likely. For it to be a Florida threat, the initial predictions would have to bear out, something that looks rather unlikely at this point.
As for the debate on the "historic" start to the season -- I think that it's likely that something like this has happened before, like HF says. The satellite era is only about 40-50 years old, recon flights have a similar lifetime, and records from before the mid-1850s are pretty spotty. It may not have occured in our lifetime, but that does not mean that it hasn't happened before.
Ultimately though, all that matters for this season is that we have had a lot of storms thus far, all impacting land, and there doesn't appear to be anything to stem the tide of storms in the short-term. I figured we'd see a pretty active early July with an MJO cycle, but I'm not sure how much longer this will keep up. My best guess is that we'll have a fairly dull late July before kicking into gear once again around the end of the first week of August for the heart of the season. The way SSTs and shear are across the basin (and have been all season), however, it's going to take a trough taking hold across the region or an influx of dry Saharan air to really slow things down. When you have the two biggest contributors to development both favorable this early in the season, plus the requisite tropical waves to kick things off, you are going to see at least some development.
We've been helped by a monsoon trough-like feature across the basin for much of the season, whether in the SW Caribbean earlier in the season or now off of the coast of Africa. It's typically a feature you see with the East & (especially) West Pacific basins, but with it's presence and the added boost from the warm SSTs off of the coast of Africa and an endless supply of tropical waves, most everything that has been coming off of the continent lately has had a shot at developing.
I may post something to that effect to the blogs sometime Wednesday along with a look at Emily once again, but that's what I'm looking at right now.
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Re: analog for emily?
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