Florida threatened by new tropical threat in Gulf of Mexico

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva warns of a new tropical threat brewing in the Gulf of Mexico that will put Florida at risk for even more rain and flooding after Helene.

Transcript

00:00A much different set up this week compared to a week ago when we were tracking Helene

00:06into the Gulf of Mexico here and it begins with just a lot of complicated or lots of

00:13pieces of the puzzle in the Caribbean and the Bay of Campeche.

00:18Yeah, it's very spread out, you know, Helene was a very consolidated storm, this you have

00:23a whole bunch of different pieces of energy, you have a few pieces of energy in the Western

00:27Caribbean, look at this, one, two, three, four.

00:29All these different pieces of energy are essentially competing to try to develop and that actually

00:34causes a bit of chaos and then neither of them can kind of take over.

00:38What we think here is that we think that piece number three, the one in the Southern Bay

00:41of Campeche, this is the one that I think is going to have the best shot of developing

00:45as it slowly moves to the north and to the east this weekend and into early next week.

00:49And when you look at the water vapor loop, you can see why, because that's the area in

00:53the Bay of Campeche right now where we have sufficient moisture and lower wind shear but

00:58boy, the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, let's say it's very hostile for development.

01:03Hostile is indeed the case.

01:04You can see all those clouds moving around very quickly.

01:07That indicates a lot of wind shear, especially across the northern Gulf of Mexico and then

01:12a lot of that gold and brown color indicating a lot of dry air.

01:16So this wasn't really something we saw with Helene and of course that is good news in

01:19this situation.

01:20So I don't anticipate any kind of rapid development with whatever starts to develop down across

01:25the southern Gulf of Mexico.

01:26It looks like anything would be a very slow development process.

01:30The one ingredient that we have in spades though are the water temperatures.

01:36They are super warm.

01:37Yeah, Helene really didn't knock down these water temperatures all that much.

01:40So this is my concern here, is the water temperature is still very, very warm, so anything could

01:46try to spin up quickly.

01:47Now, we don't anticipate it to get very strong in terms of wind speed, but we could get a

01:51named storm here in this development area as there's a narrow window of very favorable

01:55conditions, I think, where the storm would stay south of that hostile wind shear.

02:00Right now we are leaning more towards scenario one, a disorganized system.

02:06Can't rule that out though, that second scenario, Alex, especially if the wind shear comes down.

02:12But boy, oh boy, the rain.

02:13That's going to be a huge problem.

02:15Absolutely.

02:16A lot of rain on the way for Florida here next week.

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