National Hurricane Center Flagging Two Areas in the Atlantic, Development Unlikely with Either

Meanwhile, the Atlantic’s main weather satellite is offline until further notice

Update: As of Wednesday afternoon (July 16th), NOAA has resolved the issue earlier reported with GOES-19 and the satellite and all instruments are returning to normal operations. The recovery process is expected to be completed by Wednesday evening and satellite data began retransmitting as of 1:15 PM ET Wednesday, July 16th.

The National Hurricane Center added two areas to watch to its tropical outlook map on Wednesday – one that we discussed in Wednesday morning’s newsletter over the northeastern Gulf to off the southeast U.S and another Wednesday afternoon in the far eastern Atlantic only a few hundred miles off Africa.

The addition of the disturbance in the far eastern Atlantic was less a statement about its development potential than a simple nod to a healthy-looking tropical wave. Models don’t show this one going anywhere in terms of development and by the weekend increasing wind shear and dry air will formally seal its fate.

Meanwhile closer in to the U.S., forecast models continue to waffle over the development odds for an elongated area of low pressure that’s expected to form over the northeastern Gulf by late this weekend. Models have only been mildly interested in this one and turned largely bearish again overnight.

As we’ve detailed in previous newsletters, the environment just isn’t in a configuration to promote much development into the early part of next week. The broad surface low will be accompanied by a mid- to upper-level low above, jet dynamics that aren’t conducive to tropical organization. Additionally, a series of fast-moving jet stream dips beginning this weekend and persisting into early next week will ensure moderate to at times strong wind shear near the system.

Overall, the mix of wind shear and land interaction will significantly limit development potential and it’s unlikely this one clears the hurdles next week.

Heavy rain threat regardless for parts of west-central Florida

As we mentioned yesterday, regardless of development the disorganized low pressure will still bring the threat of heavy rains to parts of west-central Florida to start next week.

Models indicate periods of heavy rain beginning this weekend and ramping up across parts of west-central and northeastern Florida Sunday into Monday. Given the drought conditions in this part of Florida, this type of rain could be largely beneficial if spread out over a few days.

For now, the National Weather Service only indicates a marginal risk of excessive rainfall from Sunday through early Tuesday for the middle tier of Florida. We’ll of course monitor the trends in the event the flood risk increases for next week.

Big outage for NOAA’s big hurricane-tracking satellite

The main operational weather satellite from NOAA that we use to continuously monitor the Atlantic basin during hurricane season – also the primary satellite used by meteorologists to monitor weather systems across the eastern part of the U.S. – encountered a mechanical issue late Wednesday and was turned off to troubleshoot the problem and protect the satellite from a wider system failure.

The last satellite image we received from GOES-19 was from 4:10 PM ET Wednesday, July 15^th. According to a satellite alert message issued by NOAA two hours after GOES-19 was placed in a safe hold on Wednesday, engineers are investigating the issue and working to recover the satellite. So far no recovery timelines have been shared by the agency.

It’s worth noting that while NOAA does have satellite redundancy capabilities and can revert to its legacy (i.e., older) GOES-16 satellite to cover the Atlantic, getting this satellite in place and turned on would presumably take some time.

We rely heavily on GOES-19 for a multitude of critical satellite-derived products to investigate developing storms and to track and estimate the intensity of hurricanes. The satellite data are also critical input to forecast models, and without GOES-19 data we should expect model forecast skill to temporarily drop.

While we have some overlap in the far western Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf, with GOES-19’s western counterpart GOES-18 and in the eastern Atlantic with the European Meteosat-12 satellite, neither satellite is optimized to give a clear picture of the entire Atlantic and the pictures we capture on their edges is of degraded quality.

We’ll obviously keep you posted on the status of GOES-19 and this evolving story in the days ahead.