Tropical depression #4 forms in the Atlantic

[jpak]

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCMAT4+shtml/212034.shtml

[skids]

1. This thing sprang off the coast of africa nearly fully formed.

And it has a good amount of area to develop with little wind sheer.

[Lost-in-FL]

2. It looks like it will go

all the way north. I don't think it will be a threat to land. At least I hope so.

[jpak]

4. Which would suit me just fine...

n/t

[Iwasthere]

3. It will stay a hair under the 40 mph required for a named storm...

If it went over 40 mph they would have to name it. They have been very, very careful to avoid naming storms so far this year. There have been 3 now that went over 40 mph but they did not name them. In one they actually changed the mph numbers at NOAA I wathed it happen! Damnit I wish I would have screen shotted that cause I know many of you are going to call BS on my theory. I am telling you they don't want another year like last so if a storm looks questionable they will fudge the numbers or send planes up at opportune times. After all, Gore would look right if there were 7 named storms so far this year.

[skids]

5. Not this one. Latest image...

I think they will have to buckle to reality in this case:

Latest image: (That will probably turn black later today, so enjoy it before the refresh)

[Iwasthere]

6. So you agree with me re-them fudging numbers

... I just want to know I am not crazy. No one else seems to have noticed this pattern. One other thing that I noticed a couple of weeks ago, before the heat wave broke. Fox weather started doing there big maps with Gray instead of the dark read for temps above 100 degrees (cause the ENTIRE country was dark red for sooo long). Did anyone else notice that? They did it for just one day, or even half a day - I only saw it a couple of times.

[skids]

10. Maybe.

On the one hand these guys are scientists.

On the other hand the pervasiveness of the campaign against the environment is not to be underestimated.

I'll reserve judgement until someone goes over the archival data comparatively, which I hope/assume is being preserved by some interested party.

[Xithras]

7. NOAA numbers are continually corrected.

Which is probably why you saw them change. As new numbers come in, the sites are updated in near-realtime.

As for going over 40MPH, the requirement is that they have to go over 40MPH and actually maintain it long enough for the verification process to take place (if the speed is detected by doppler, it has to be verified by plane, buoy, or land sensor). If one method of reading has the storm over 40MPH and it cannot be verified, the storm never gets named. Obviously the point is moot if we're talking about a 100MPH serious hurricane, but every year there are storms that get up to the threshold, 35-45MPH, but never get named because they can't be verified in time to finish the process.

And no, the NOAA does not put a priority on naming the storms. If a storm hits 41MPH for a couple of hours and dies back down to the low 30's, they don't consider it important enough to worry about. These "borderline" hurricanes generally only get attention when they maintain their borderline speeds for an extended period, or if they begin to approach land.

[Iwasthere]

8. Then why even have the 40 mph threshhold?

Lets just trust them to tell if a storm is dangerous then.

If a storm is blowing 41 mph for two hours it should be a mandatory named storm, PERIOD! Otherwise they really could alter this procedure a bit. Saying, "lets, perhaps, not start naming storms now till they stay at 44 mph for 2 1/2 hours, yeah thats it, 2 1/2 hours and then we will save Joe Public some anxieties".

Where do you draw the line?

[Xithras]

9. But it's the process that's problematic.

Doppler tends to lose accuracy over distance, and the ocean buoys aren't maintained on a regular basis (they're in the middle of nowhere in the ocean). If land or satellite based doppler hits a storm and indicates that it's at 43mph, for example, the margin of error is large enough to question whether or not that reading is accurate (it might be 46, it might be 39). This is why storm speeds aren't "official" until they hit a secondary corroborating sensor at first. Out in the middle of the Atlantic, this means waiting until it hits a buoy, or sending a plane out to check it. If the storm is moving slowly, or the track in uncooperative, it can take the better part of the day for a storm to hit a buoy. If they have to send a plane out, it's a six hour trip to the mid-Atlantic spawning grounds.

The thing is, the precise speed of a hurricane isn't really considered all that important when they're still in the mid-Atlantic. At that point the forecasters are more interested in calculating the track and growth rate of the storm, both of which work fine with satellite based doppler. Out there, nobody cares about 41 or 39 miles an hour, because neither the ships or the fish really give a dang about whether or not the storm has a name. If the storm gets very powerful in the mid-Atlantic, it will be named simply because there's little question about it's intensity (a doppler return on a mid-Atlantic storm with 120mph winds will obviously merit a name, because even calculating in its inaccuracies, it's well above the limit). A borderline hurricane won't get named until that second verification of wind speed is established, which typically won't happen until it moves into the western atlantic.

The problem with your suggestion is simple: If satellite doppler puts a storm at 41MPH, with a +/- 5MPH margin of error, the track doesn't have it hitting a buoy for a day, and the plane is six hours out, do you name it? What if doppler has it at 41MPH for the whole six hours, but the plane finds only 38MPH when it reaches there? Furthermore, how would you justify sending someone out to check a borderline storm like that, if its track has it spinning harmlessly into the North Atlantic? Does the name really matter if it's only going to be a tropical depression by the time it actually reaches anyone who cares?

Personally, I can't justify putting peoples lives at risk just to determine whether or not CNN can call it a "named storm".

[uppityperson]

11. wunderground link, Jeff Masters blog link, stuff

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=471&tstamp=200608

The strong tropical wave that moved off the coast of Africa Sunday has become large and well-organized enough to be classified as Tropical Depression Four. The depression is located southeast of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, and is expected to track northwestwards just to the south of these islands over the next two days. The waters under the wave are 27-28 C, which is warm enough to allow some modest intensification. Wind shear is a low 5-10 knots. There is a large area of dry air and Saharan dust to the wave's north, but this is far enough away that it shouldn't inhibit intensification over the next day or two, and this depression should be Tropical Debby by Tuesday afternoon. The GFDL intensifies the storm up to a strong Category 1 hurricane by Sunday, and the official NHC forecast has it close to hurricane strength by Saturday.

Unless you live in the Cape Verde Islands, this storm is unlikely to affect you. As we can see from the plot of historical storm tracks of August tropical depressions that formed near the location of the current storm (Figure 1), none of these storms have affected any land areas other than the Cape Verde Islands. The GFS model has the storm recurving northwards well east of Bermuda early next week. The Cape Verde Islands, however, are under a Tropical Storm Warning, and will get some heavy rain and high winds from this system starting Tuesday morning.

[skids]

12. Meanwhile in the pacific... and WTF?

We now are up to I. But riddle me this, will ya?

Ileana is the one near the Mexico coast. Hector is the one getting the crap beat out of it by shear in the middle. What's that on the right at 165-170W? That don't look like an upper level fixture to me... but no mention of it at all???



You can barely see it off the edge of this...

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/DATA/RT/cpac-ir4-loop.html