Tropical weather forecasting is right up there in difficulty with juggling more than three balls, watering a cactus enough, but not too much or too little and ironing a duvet cover which we think you will agree are the three most difficult challenges which face us humans.
If you take a look at the GFS today for the 00z and 06z run then not much really catches our eye. We have Tropical Development Seventeen which is a few hundred miles Southwest of the Azores and not doing very much and post-tropical Nate which is now a band of rain and showers. We expect Tropical Development Seventeen to be named Ophelia in the next few days as it remains in situ and continues to deepen. The GFS wants to develop this system into a rather potent Tropical system in the next few days but continues to keep it out in the mid-Atlantic. The ECMWF and GEM models though show a rather different outcome as they develop Tropical Development Seventeen into a deep tropical system then brings it around the ridge of the Azores high towards the UK early next week.
Normally, if one of these models goes out on a limb then we can be sure that it's an outlier model and will tend to rejoin the rest of the pack over the coming few days. But Tropical Development Seventeen is an interesting system and deserves some close attention over the next few days. The two wide ranging solutions, all from respectable global weather models shows Tropical Development Seventeen obviously tapping into the deep oceanic warmth of the Tropical Atlantic. This is important, as usually when these systems remain very slow moving they tend to become victims of their own success as they churn up the oceanic waters and bring cooler water to the surface which removes the warm tropical air which fuels these systems.
At the moment though we have all the global models giving some wide ranging and interesting developments in the Tropical Atlantic over the coming week or so. They can't all be right... but then, they can't all be wrong either.
METEOROLOGIST : CANTIRONADUVET
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