Tropical activity ramps up as Gulf system eyes the Texas coast

[00:00:09]Welcome back to ArkMine at 10:00 right here on Fox 23.

[00:00:13]>> Meteorologist Hannah Shehy is here with us now tracking tropical storm Bertha.

[00:00:18]What's going on with Bertha? Hannah.

[00:00:19]>> Yeah, so this just got upgraded to a tropical storm last night, late last night. It was a tropical depression for a while, over a day, and this is just brewing in the Gulf of Mexico and it's going to be tracking its way westward towards Louisiana and Texas. So, this is a live image of what Bertha looks like right now. This is a radar and satellite image. And right now, it's a tropical storm. You can see a silver line. It's kind of hard to make out, but it started just off the west coast of Florida.

[00:00:49]That's where it was starting to brew and then it kind of swirled around a little bit. was starting to take shape and it's still a little bit disorganized and I'm going to go into a little bit of why that is in just a second. But I do want to show you guys the cone of uncertainty. That's what the National Hurricane Center calls the cone on your screen. Okay.

[00:01:07]>> And it just shows you that >> it's not a good name. I know it sounds scary. I was going to say [laughter] cone of uncertainty.

[00:01:14]>> It does have a scary name, especially when you have an intense tropical cyclone, but this isn't not too particularly intense. It's not expected to gain any more strength uh as as far as going up in intensity into a hurricane. So, we're expected to stay a tropical storm, which is good news for the Gulf Coast. However, we are expecting several inches of rainfall along the Louisiana Mississippi coast.

[00:01:38]It's going to make landfall along the Louisiana coast in the next couple of days here and then by Saturday start to dissipate into a remnant low pressure system on Saturday. So I do want to show you guys just the visible satellite image from this morning of tropical storm Bertha and I want you guys to see how it is not vertically stacked if that makes sense. If this was a lot more organized, you would see clouds kind of centered around this low pressure system like a hurricane would be. This is a still image now, but a lot of those clouds are actually falling down to the southwest of the low you can see on the screen. And it's because we've got really strong upper level winds from the northeast that's pushing those clouds to the southwest, making it so it's not vertically stacked. It is not well organized and it's destroying the potential it has to become a hurricane.

[00:02:34]So that's why the sup thing about the El Nino that we are in right now is that the upper level winds along the Gulf and the Caribbean and the Atlantic are strong right now which makes these storms kind of tilt and fall to you know whatever side that wind is on. And so it's hard for these storms to become well organized. And that's what exactly what we're seeing here. And guys, we're off to an awfully slow start to hurricane season this year. We've now only had two named cyclones. Uh Arthur was earlier in June. Bertha, of course, just got named last night. And the Colorado State University forecast, which is a worldleading hurricane center, uh they've been backing down on their numbers since they first came out with their first prediction in April.

[00:03:21]They first said 13 name storms. That's that's what they were predicting for this hurricane season in June. They backed it off to 11 and they came out with a new forecast in earlier earlier this month in July. They are now saying that they are predicting nine named storms uh through November 30th. So it they are backing it off and it's because we've had such a slow start. Typically we would see a few tropical storms. By now we've only had two and again that was of last night. Typically we see 14 and so far again we have had two and we have not had a hurricane yet.

[00:03:57]So I also want to point this out because we don't often we don't typically see our peak Atlantic hurricane activity until August, September and October. Our peak uh data data day for hurricane activity or our our largest day for hurricanes or when our scientific peak is is on September 11th. So, we are not yet there. I do think we could see the tropics start to wake up as we head through August and then peak in the September and October uh range. But again, I do think this will be lessened because of the brewing El Nino in the Pacific. That is leaving their waters a lot warmer. That Pacific Ocean has seen a lot of hurricane activity so far this season where we have seen close to, you know, real a really small amount.

[00:04:45]Typically we see more uh through July, but we just we haven't. And it's because of those strong upper level winds that are kind of tilting all the storms that do start to appear and they just kind of fall apart and lose steam.

[00:04:57]>> I don't think anyone's complaining about that.

[00:04:59]>> No, I don't think so either.

[00:05:00]>> Yeah, I think this is good news. It could change though potentially and ramp up at some point. So >> yeah, and it only takes one storm to make the season memorable. So, we of course we can't underestimate the season, but all we know is that we are looking at a little fewer than normal.

[00:05:16]>> That's great.

[00:05:17]>> Yeah.

[00:05:17]>> Okay. If you have any weather related questions you'd like to ask, just scan the QR code on your screen and click on weather authority. There you can leave us a question and you might see them answered on air. Thanks Hannah.