Forecasters are keeping a close eye on the Caribbean Sea, right by Central America.
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00:00Sometimes we get pre-season or very early season tropical development in Central America or near Central America out of something that we call a gyre.
00:09And a gyre is a little bit larger, a little more ambiguous than a focused zone of low pressure.
00:16But these form somewhere over the southwestern Caribbean, sometimes right over the Central American landmass.
00:21And they are large swirls or basically a large swirl of clusters of showers and thunderstorms that are often kind of disorganized.
00:31But they ambiguously kind of rotate around a center zone.
00:35Now, we have occasions where we have strong cold fronts in the early part of the tropical season, still in May, June, that often push down into the Gulf.
00:44And sometimes these can also deliver northwest flow that can ultimately kind of feed into this general circulation.
00:50You've got the easter leaves here, the trade winds that often are on the north side of this.
00:56So that can kind of work with the gyre to produce a more focused area of low pressure that sometimes can form and become kind of an infant storm system that sometimes can even become a tropical depression or tropical storm.
01:10They often begin to drift west or northwest.
01:12Sometimes they drift north.
01:14The current weather pattern is probably a little more resistant to this impacting the United States.
01:18But later next week, into the following week, we'll have to keep an eye out for this area.
01:22There's no gyre yet, but there will be a zone here of broad, low pressure with lots of zones of thunderstorms kind of circulating around it that will bring locally heavy rain and downpours to Cuba, Jamaica, the Caymans, areas like Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Costa Rica.
01:37And this is an area of interest beginning about a week from now through, not this weekend, but the following weekend, the weekend after Mother's Day weekend, into the following week.
01:48So between May 15th and 22nd, we've got to keep an eye out for areas around Central America.