Short Version: Humberto will likely become a hurricane and track somewhere near Bermuda as a weaker system lurks off the coast. Gabrielle may not be a hurricane much longer but will bring hurricane force winds to the Azores, another system headed to The Philippines.
Here’s the Atlantic watch/warning and official forecast track summary, with hurricane warnings up for the Azores in the far eastern Atlantic:
Of course the selfish forecast is what’s going on in the western Atlantic. Tropical Storm Humberto formed out of Invest AL93 yesterday, and is currently a sheared minimal tropical storm. The forecast is complicated by several factors, not the least of which is another tropical wave nearby, Invest area AL94. Here are the initial conditions for 850mb wind, relative vorticity, and 500mb streamlines (winds) for the situation around Humberto and AL94 …
Even without getting into the details you can sense it’s a complex tangle of forces. When you run the models, you (actually an algorithm) try to figure out where the center of each vortex is and how strong it may be at each step in time, such as this snapshot in five days of just the low level winds and pressures that are typically used by low-trackers …
and that ends up as a track line on a map …
As noted yesterday, whenever there are strong drivers in a complex numerical models (especially a vortex), several problems arise. The first is that small unavoidable differences in how the model is initialized means there can be a wide swings in the results. You can throw around terms like Fujuwhara effect and run fancy graphics of spinning storms, but our ability to model this kind of thing isn’t as pretty as the pictures might show. The land interactions – especially for AL94 – will be important. Bottom line is that the two systems will interact, Humberto seems to be developing faster and will possibly choke out AL94, which will either be absorbed, torn apart, or, if it tracks far enough west, maybe eek out a meager existence brushing the Southeast coast as a weak storm, although the latest runs show a tropical storm hitting South Carolina.
Right now, it doesn’t look like there is any significant risk to Frogmore and environs. Humberto should stay well offshore, but Bermuda needs to be watching because many scenarios take Humberto over it as a hurricane of some kind, possibly a major (Cat 3 or higher). As for AL94, NHC says
A tropical depression is likely to form when the disturbance is in the vicinity of the Bahamas late this week. Interests in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Bahamas should monitor the progress of this system.
So … if you are in the named places, “monitor” which means checking the NHC Tropical Weather Outlooks (TWO), which are published at 8am, 2pm, 8pm, and 2am. If advisories are started they will be posted at 11am, 5pm, 11pm, or 5am, but the TWO will give you a heads up. As noted above, any threat to the SEUS from AL94 is pretty vague at this point, probably worth checking in Saturday to see if anything has developed, and which scenario is more likely.
If you like this commentary you can subscribe to the emails, which is the best and only really reliable way to get them, and/or donate to keep it going, at this this link. You can also follow us on X/Twitter (@EnkiResearch), Telegram, BlueSky, or even Facebook if that’s your preferred social media morass.
Thank you for reliable reporting!