Overnight, the area of disturbed weather mentioned in my previous post intensified enough that the National Hurricane Center upgraded the storm to the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season’s first tropical depression.
As you can see below in a satellite image captured at 7:45AM EDT this morning, TD One is showing increasing signs of organization. You can clearly see overshooting tops (the bubbly looking clumps of clouds), which are clouds that are breaking up through the tropopause and into the lower stratosphere. This is a hallmark sign of intense thunderstorm updrafts, where warm, humid air is rapidly moving upwards in the atmosphere. You can even see the beginning of what may eventually become a spiral band forming directly south of the storm’s center.
National Hurricane Center has issued tropical storm warnings for the Eastern Florida coast. TD One’s sustained wind speeds are at 35mph, only 4mph shy of tropical storm criteria. In fact, as of this writing, TD One may have already become Tropical Storm Arthur, our first named storm of the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season.
Storm Track Forecast
TD One is forecast to begin a turn towards the north, then northeast over the period of the next day or so. Thereafter, it is forecast to steadily accelerate in forward speed towards the northeast as a cold front currently approaching our region from the west begins to steer the storm. It appears in the latest model runs that the storm may make a landfall in the Cape Hatteras area of North Carolina, and the move offshore of the Northeast Friday night into Saturday.
Intensity Forecast
Although the strongest thunderstorms are currently confined to the southern half of the storm, there is high confidence that the storm will continue to organize and become a tropical storm shortly. The National Hurricane Center is also now forecasting that TD One will have sufficiently good conditions to strengthen into a weak hurricane by the time it makes its closest approach to North Carolina. It will eventually get absorbed by the cold front mentioned above and make an extratropical transition somewhere off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes.
What This Means for Us
The tropical moisture from this storm is increasingly likely to throw a damper on July 4th plans for the area, when the storm and approaching cold front will interact to produce the chance for heavy rain, thunderstorms, and possibly some strong wind gusts. However, even though this is forecast to occur within the next 3-4 days, there is still a good deal of uncertainty as to the final track of this storm, especially as it approaches the Northeast. More updates soon!
