A tropical wave east of the Lesser Antilles is westbound & has a fairly concentrated area of showers & storms. Any development will be slow with a fair amount of dry air to the wave's west. Forecast models -- at this time -- show no long range development....
Thunderstorms continue to flare in the Western Gulf but have not had a lot of staying power. The convection looks to be tied to a weak upper low that's over far S. Texas & Northern Mexico. Movement is west/northwest with little time for development before moving inland....
What's left of "Debby" is rolling through the Western Atlantic bypassing Bermuda & will soon be in the N. Atlantic. No re-generation is expected.
Speaking of "Debby"....the storm was, of course, a bit of an enigma to try to predict. Here's a synopsis:
As is well known, forecasting the path of "Debby" proved difficult at best. It would appear that since "Debby" never became well developed -- almost always heavily weighted on the east side -- the steering currents were going to come more
from the lower levels. In addition, an upper level ridge across the south did not become particularly strong & was removed a bit to the north & west. All this combined for a tropical cyclone that moved east into Florida rather than west which meant for a huge coup by the American forecasting model GFS.
The GFS consistently showed an east moving storm. The GFS also hinted at tropical development in the Gulf &/or Caribbean 1-2 weeks in advance. Something the model also did with "Beryl". The GFS did struggle some with the speed of the system but -- hands down -- was the clear cut winner & early on was virtually the only model to consistently predict an east movement.
The European model did not consistently pick up on tropical development in the long range & was even worse in insisting on a westward moving strong tropical cylcone -- hurricane strength, in fact. It wasn't until Sun. afternoon -- 48 hours before landfall -- that the European started to turn "Debby" more north & not until Mon. that the model turned "Debby" east.
The UKMET model was pretty much lock-step with the European so gets a failing grade.
The more mesoscale NAM was equally bad in taking "Debby" west before finally catching on Sun. night-Mon.
Such a spread in the models + a disorganized tropical system made for a forecasting conundrum. I have to admit I favored the westward move originally & based my forecast on climatology & a consensus of the models. In addition -- in past years -- the GFS has had a right (or eastward) bias. Perhaps tweeks to the model have taken care of this problem. Recent tweeks to the European model seem to have hurt the model as well as the NAM. The so-called hurricane models -- HWRF & GFDL were simply not in the game yet again which has to be a huge disappointment to the American science community.
