Late-season African easterly wave could become the next storm this week

Since my previous update last Wednesday, Milton made an extremely rare landfall as a Category 3 hurricane near Tampa (Sarasota)... the only previous times this was known to have happened were 1921 and 1848.  Milton was also the fifth hurricane to make landfall on the U.S. Gulf coast; the only other time there were more was in 1886 (6).  And, Leslie finally dissipated on Saturday after spending an impressive ten days as a tropical cyclone in the central Atlantic.  The season's track map spanning Alberto through Milton is shown below.

Today's post is primarily on a late-season easterly wave that exited the African coast last Thursday morning (Oct 6th) and has continued to show some signs of development.  This time of year, we don't typically see these easterly waves have much success in developing... we're normally focused much more on the western Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.  As you see on the map below, there is actually an area of interest brewing in the western Caribbean as well which NHC is giving a 20% chance of formation in the coming week.

But, NHC is giving the easterly wave -- tagged as Invest 94L -- a 60% probability of becoming the season's next tropical cyclone in the coming week as it heads west toward the Windward Islands.  The tracks generally continue west to west-northwest for the foreseeable future, and the intensity generally remains weak.  In some form, it will reach the Windward Islands or just north of there on Friday. I think we need to wait until it actually develops to bother looking much beyond five days.

Regarding the future disturbance in the western Caribbean, long-range model ensembles have been hinting that it will develop and then drift westward into the Yucatan peninsula then perhaps into the Bay of Campeche.

The next two names on the list are Nadine and Oscar.  Both of those names are still original from the 1982 list, so this year would be their 8th time on a list... though Nadine has only been reached three of those times (2000, 2012, 2018), and just two times for Oscar (2012, 2018). 

As of today, neither of these features look too concerning, but it's certainly worth keeping an eye on them.  The historically-active first half of October is now behind us, but even the second half has had some infamous storms, so it's way too soon to stop paying attention.

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