Signs from the GFS: Hurricane Season is Approaching

追加: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]Hey, good morning to you. Mark Sudduth here on the road. Good to see you. I'm in Oklahoma City working with Mississippi State University and their storm chase class.

[00:00:12]My friend Greg Nordstrom leading that up. So, yep, we're out here in the plains for the next week or so, but it is time to talk about the tropics a little bit, especially since our good friend the GFS is cooking up some shenanigans. Once again, it's that time of year. So, I wanted to talk about it with a video discussion for you. All right? So, let's get right to it. I'm going to just stay on screen because with this old laptop, I've learned that when I toggle the camera on and off, sometimes it messes up the whole process. So, I'm just going to move me out of the way a little bit so I can access my tabs up here, but I'll be right here the whole time. Anyway, satellite animation here this morning.

[00:00:55]Not too bad out there. We're getting close to the time of year where the Atlantic hurricane season is about to begin calendar-wise, but this region through here, at least sea surface temperature-wise, is already favorable. The water temps are warm enough, but you have to have other ingredients, other factors that come into play, and those are not there yet. There's a lot of strong upper-level wind activity and other negative factors that we don't have anything brewing.

[00:01:23]However, as the thumbnail implies, we do get some signs coming in now from the GFS that something might be trying to brew up in the southeastern Pacific, whose hurricane season has already begun.

[00:01:37]Not too much going on out there at all.

[00:01:38]Just a little area of showers and thunderstorms, somewhat concentrated way out to the south and west of the Baja Peninsula, but that is just about it. I will point out that there is a small cluster of shower and thunderstorm activity here along the Yucatan Channel, just off the west western tip of Cuba but nothing organized and nothing concentrated and that leads us to the National Hurricane Center homepage. They don't have anything in their 7-day forecast for the Atlantic. The 2-day forecast, of course, there's nothing. And if we switch this back over to 7 days and we look at the East Pack nada, nothing, zilch, and same with the Central Pacific hurricane season, which you know, we'll worry about that later on. But yeah, nice and clear for now. I like this map. It's kind of a simple map and um but it does show us the whole Atlantic basin and I can help you kind of understand what's what. Let's use this more of I guess this green color will make things pop better. So, this is our monsoon trough and it's an area of convergence where the air is coming together and the monsoonal action is kind of a reversal of the wind flow, basically.

[00:02:54]Uh but notice pressures are pretty high out here. We're getting into the subtropics up here, but 1022 millibars there's your 1016 um barometric pressure line, all right?

[00:03:05]And uh so, not very low pressure overall, which is exactly what we'd expect this time of year.

[00:03:11]There's a tropical wave a little seedling kind of riding along and maybe this piece of energy is what the GFS is starting to pick up on as it eventually makes its way over here to the western Caribbean. Just speculating a bit and we'll get to the GFS in just a moment and see what it's up to. Uh there's another tropical wave tucked in here in the Caribbean and then another one even uh in the southeastern Pacific, but everything pretty convection-free right now. Not a lot of shower and thunderstorm activity and we just don't see much developing in the near term, the next 3 to 5 days. Uh the models, the ensembles, all that AI stuff, nothing really coming together that we need to worry about. But, the GFS is trying to cook some stuff up here. I'll take you back to last night's run, what we call the zero Z run, the zero Zulu time run. And this is the layer of the atmosphere that's about 5,000 ft above our heads.

[00:04:11]And we call that the 850 millibar layer.

[00:04:14]And we're looking at that vorticity signature where uh we're trying to bundle all of these colors down here, these reds and yellows. There's not much of it, but we want to see if something bundles up. You take that relative vorticity, in this case, um eventually showers and thunderstorms, any kind of energy that pops up, and focus it around a low pressure center. That's what tropical cyclones do.

[00:04:38]And when they do it efficiently, they can get quite nasty, as we well know.

[00:04:42]So, let's just look and see what happens here through the next little bit of time. Let's move me. I'm just going to move me over here for a minute. All right? So, we can see everything nice and clear.

[00:04:53]All right. So, let's move this out. This is 24 hours out. So, this will be valid Wednesday night tonight. All right? So, there's Wednesday night. There's another 24 hours. So, that's 48, 72, 96, and then finally at 120. So, 5 days out.

[00:05:09]And this is important. At day five, we do start to see the GFS piling up the air right over here, tucked in there along the Yucatan, eastern side of the Yucatan now down there near Belize, and to the north of Honduras and Nicaragua.

[00:05:27]Uh maybe, okay? Hard to know if this will actually happen, but it is 5 days.

[00:05:31]It's not 12 days.

[00:05:33]So, the GFS picking up on some piece of energy that tries to start to concentrate down there. You can see some of this looks to be spurious potentially spurious vorticity energy in the atmosphere streaming northwest off of the mountains of Columbia. Sometimes the GFS picks up on that. And you just need a little kick in the atmosphere sometimes, and yes, that can happen.

[00:05:59]Um so, this isn't entirely impossible, but I'm not too concerned about it, and I'll show you why as we move forward.

[00:06:06]That that makes more sense, okay? So, let's uh get the tele-strater to work again. So, if we move this out, that was day five, and then we go out another 24 hours, there's day six, and then finally at day seven, and we stop there, mainly because that's as far out as our tropical weather outlooks go from the National Hurricane Center. So, there's no reason to look way out in time where more of the chaos factor starts to get into place, and whatever.

[00:06:35]And you'll see stuff on social media anyway, so you know, you'll eventually see it. But yes, the GFS usually tries to cook something up this time of the year. It's a known bias, and the problem is you never know when it's going to be right. But there are some clues that we can look for, all right? And one of those is the ensemble guidance, all right? That was the operational one run of one model, and the GFS operational. What about the rest of the members of what we call the GFS ensemble? And Dr. Levi Cowan's Tropical Tidbits site here gives us an easy way to see that.

[00:07:11]This is all the members and their low pressure centers at that 850 millibar level coming together. So, by 72 hours we can start to see using the gradient, you have your blue, and then you start to get into the deeper gradient of yellow and eventually orange. You'll see it. Um there are quite a few members where we can see a lowering of the pressures in this area, all right? And these individual numbers are teeny tiny, but those are individual low pressure areas. So, the GFS ensemble is starting to pick up on a general lowering of the pressures down in the Northwest Caribbean and now we're out at 180 hours, but there is a signal in the GEFS, that's the ensemble forecast system, right?

[00:07:55]It's definitely there. You can see that as well as I can. So, okay, that's interesting. Well, what about the other ensembles? Let's look at the Euro the ensemble prediction system, the EPS as it's often referred to.

[00:08:10]Does it show anything? And it has a lot more ensemble members just for you to know. And we run this out this goes out to day six, which is fine.

[00:08:20]No, not much of a signal at all down where the GFS has it. Much more of a signal off the East Coast and Southeast Coast well offshore.

[00:08:30]And that's very typical for an El Nino year, story for another day, but not much of a signal down in the Caribbean from the ensemble prediction system there. Uh, from the Euro, the E the EPS as we call it. And the AIFS, which is the artificial intelligence forecast system from the Euro. Same kind of thing, that's day six. It just was already there cuz I moved Once you switch the model to whatever time frame, that's where you keep showing it. So, the AI model starting to show stuff offshore as well. Nothing to speak of down in the Caribbean, maybe a few low centers up here in the Northeast coast. So, bottom line, GFS kind of out on its own, which is very typical this time of year.

[00:09:16]We'll see. Sometimes it'll be right, you just never know.

[00:09:20]Um, climatology does favor this region that we would be looking at. Water temperatures are warm enough, but the upper level winds probably not going to be there. Um, we'll keep looking at this each morning though as we move forward.

[00:09:32]Few other clues that we can look for on our own as well over the coming days.

[00:09:37]This is an easy one. I mean, it's just handed to us.

[00:09:40]Vorticity, all that energy, there it is coming off South America.

[00:09:44]Uh we have to see if it gets aimed a little bit more north, if there's any energy that comes in from a tropical wave, and then let's start to see if any of this vorticity shows up and starts to bundle kind of like what you see way up here in the North Atlantic, but this is all stretched out. And if this is the first time you've ever seen one of my videos, I'm just giving you some clues as to what to look for.

[00:10:04]Honestly, this little piece right here, sitting out in the open Gulf, let's see if we get something like that down in this area, a little larger in size, and see if it persists and starts to concentrate. Right now, there's nothing there. There's not even much in the way of shower and thunderstorm activity, but we can watch all of this evolve or not in almost real time, all right? And we'll I'll be doing these videos all day. All day? No.

[00:10:33]All week as I'm out here. Well, the rest of the week. It's Wednesday. We've been traveling since Sunday, so anyway, for the rest of the week, I'll be doing these videos for you each morning, and we'll stay on top of all this. Couple other things to show you in favor that something could develop.

[00:10:48]Water temperatures quite a bit above normal across the entire Gulf and Northwest Caribbean, but even more so over here in the Eastern Pacific with that burgeoning El Niño. We can zoom in here to the Gulf and Caribbean region.

[00:11:04]Yeah, I mean, if something does get going coming out of coming up out of the Caribbean, if we ever get anything in the Southwest Atlantic, water temperature is quite a bit above the long-term average, but other factors absolutely have to be in place. Not much dry air, you know, if you have too much dry air, uh these systems can't develop. Strong hostile upper-level winds, that kind of stuff.

[00:11:29]A lot has to come together, and we're just not quite there yet. Speaking of the Gulf, it is definitely warm enough.

[00:11:34]This is the actual sea surface temperature chart and I don't see any areas in here that I can spot that are under 26° C or roughly 80° F.

[00:11:46]Let's round up and call it that. So, the entirety of the Gulf is now warm enough just barely, but it's there for tropical cyclones to develop. In fact, out here we're looking at 28° C, which is 82° F.

[00:12:01]So, you know, there are some reasons to believe maybe, but it is nothing to worry about.

[00:12:07]So, if you start to see stuff on social media about a scary hurricane developing or any other other hyperbolic nonsense, it is just that. All right, there's a lot of other trusted sources out there.

[00:12:21]I hope that I and our folks here, the community at Hurricane Track, can be one of those trusted sources, but you know who's the best? Every year, undefeated, is the National Hurricane Center. So, rely on hurricanes.gov. You can just go there and skip all this, quite honestly. If you don't see anything on their map, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. And I just to give you a little secret there.

[00:12:44]But, I hope you enjoy these videos and I hope you learn something from it. And don't forget, it's all about that algorithm, unfortunately, this day and age. Us YouTubers, content creators as a whole, we encourage you to do it. Hit that like button for me. Please subscribe to the channel if you want more information like this, if you find it useful and helpful. It's good to have you join our group of people who share similar views as you, that we like to watch the weather. All right, now I can drop out of here and get this video online for you. I'm Mark Sudduth from all of us at the Hurricane Track Community. We appreciate you watching.

[00:13:19]Always hope you learn something. I will talk to you again tomorrow morning.