As the Houston Press used to say, This Incredible Freakin' Weather

[omorka]

What the hell is up with the weather?

Not the heat waves in Europe, or the devastating heat and storms in St. Louis; I mean the local weather patterns, which are Teh Screwed. Since when does a coastal area get its thunderstorms rolling in off the ocean shallows in the morning? The solar heat pump is supposed to evaporate water all through the morning and mid-day, and then it's supposed to come back down in tall, narrow thunderheads as scattered showers every afternoon and early evening. About an hour after sunset, the evaporation is supposed to have stopped enough that the thunderheads are no longer self-sustaining, and it goes back to just being partly cloudy for the night. That's the way it's supposed to work. That's the way it's always worked before.

But for the last month, it's been raining in the morning, quite regularly, or at least regularly enough to wake me up from the sound of water pounding on the window air conditioners (although today I needed to get up anyway - trying to get back to something resembling a normal sleep cycle instead of arriving on the first day of school having been up for 36 hours). The local radar is looking pretty gross; there's a huge mass of storm rolling in directly off the Gulf from the southeast. Note: the southeast. This is not a normal storm band traveling west-to-east across the continent; this is the same pattern of storms rolling in from the ocean evaporation that the normal late-afternoon-and-evening-thundershowers follow. At 10 am.

How warm does the Gulf have to be to generate the storms this early in the day?

What is it going to look like in September?

Comments

[krystiegoddess.livejournal.com]

it's an almost-tropical thing off the coast of Mexico . . . if it wasn't so close to land it'd probably develop into something with a name. fun, eh?

[lasarina.livejournal.com]

And since when does the Gulf start developing tropicals off the eastern side of Mexico? Aren't they supposed to form in the Atlantic?

[krystiegoddess.livejournal.com]

There have been several storms that formed in the gulf . . .

courtesy of a quick web search, there were 4 storms in '05 that started in the gulf (Bret, Cindy, Gert, Jose) . . .

as an aside, this is a cool website for hurricane history: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/weather/hurricane/sfl-hc-canehistory1,0,3352010.special

[omorka.livejournal.com]

It's not uncommon for tropical storms to form in the Gulf itself . . . in September.

That this is happening before the Gulf has absorbed the August heat is Bad News. That Cindy not only managed the feat but turned into a hurricane (albeit a weak one) in early July was sign one that last year's storm sequence was Going To Suck.

[krystiegoddess.livejournal.com]

Alicia was a gulf storm - mid August . . . and there were only 4 named storms that year . . .

in 86, Bonnie was a gulf storm in July, and there were only 6 that year.

i'm not exactly sure that it's a great indicator of storm suckage . . .

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I suppose . . . it's about where Allison formed, and that was in June, and the rest of that season wasn't so very bad, after her . . . but she formed off the remnants of an African wave. This thing looks like it's just the Gulf heat itself running the generator.