The easterly wave I mentioned in Tuesday's post (Invest 96L) has been upgraded to Tropical Storm Dolly... the fourth named storm of the season. Zooming in on the storm with some enhanced satellite imagery, we can see the mostly-exposed surface circulation and the thunderstorm activity displaced to the south of the center... and indication of some dry air and northerly wind shear.
The forecast from the National Hurricane Center as of 11am Eastern maintains it as a tropical storm for the next three days then dissipates. Model guidance supports this with few exceptions, so the chance of this being a serious threat to the Leeward Islands and eastern Greater Antilles this weekend is very slim.
Here's where looking at ensembles is useful... to explore the spread of potential outcomes in the coming week+. Among the American GFS ensemble, the European ECMWF ensemble, and the Google DeepMind ensemble, you'd be hard-pressed to find any support for this to survive the next few days. Even the 1000-member DeepMind ensemble has zero members surviving much beyond the Leeward Islands. So the NHC forecast comes with a lot of confidence.
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The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) is at about 12% of average for the date, and the forecasts don't show Dolly contributing too much to the tally. However, just because it's a slow season, we are entering the heart of it and even a single strong hurricane making landfall somewhere can make it a really bad season for that area.
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Why does Dolly come around every 6 yrs? How do they rotate the names? Thank you, NDC
ReplyDeleteGreat question! This, and details on how names get retired, is in this post: https://bmcnoldy.blogspot.com/2026/03/100th-storm-name-retired-after-2025.html
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