Atlantic Angst (9 August 2025)

The NHC Tropical Weather Outlook this morning for the Atlantic has two blobs of doom. Disturbance #1 isn’t going to be very doomy, but Disturbance #2, currently exiting the coast of Africa, seems to have some potential to be a threat in the long term, and the usual suspects are soiling themselves in anticipation. Here’s where things stand as of this morning.

The 8am TWO has a tropical wave coming off of Africa (#2) at a 40% chance of formation as it moves across the central Atlantic …

Conditions should be more favorable for something to spin up by early next week, and both of the major global models 00z runs show a storm by Day 7 of the forecast (next Friday evening, 15 August), GFS on left, ECM on the right. The GFS has a stronger storm at this point, the ECM weaker, but obviously in roughly the same place.

The TWO and serious tropical cyclone (hurricane) forecasts only go out to seven days for a reason: the models are increasingly unreliable beyond that, especially when there isn’t even a storm yet! There are a lot of factors that go in to storm formation that are tricky and poorly understood, so don’t get terribly upset about long range forecasts, a lot can happen between now and 10-14 days from now.

That said, take what follows as what we know now, and a signal that hurricane season is probably getting started, so if you haven’t gotten ready yet, now is a good time. You can use the checklists at FEMA as a starting point (link).

At this point we look for two things: model-to-model consistency, and run-to-run consistency. Model to model at 10 days is quite good, both have spun up mature hurricanes:

And here is a comparison between the 00Z and 06Z GFS runs (note the big models are only run every 6 hours – that’s why hitting refresh every five minutes is a wast of time and wears out your keyboard). This time let’s use the fancy-slidee-thingee:

While close, the 06z run has shifted the storm away from the Bahamas and away from the US. By day 14 the 00z GFS run smacks North Carolina with a major hurricane, whereas the latest run at 06z curves the storm offshore and brushes Vineland (Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) with an extratropical system.

So in short, at this point, if you have a hurricane plan, nothing to worry about. By Monday folks in the Eastern Caribbean will want to start paying attention, and by the later part of next week maybe the southeastern US – if it spins up and if it follows this track – it could very easily curve offshore and only bother the fish.

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