Vertical wind shear weakened Tropical Storm Danny as it entered the eastern Caribbean Sea and its circulation degenerated into a weak area of low pressure.\u00a0 However, a new tropical storm formed about a thousand miles east of the remnants of Danny and the National Hurricane Center designated it as Tropical Storm Erika.\u00a0 At 11:00 p.m. EDT on Monday the center of Tropical Storm Erika was located at latitude 14.4\u00b0N and longitude 47.7\u00b0W which put it about 955 miles (1535 km) east of the Leeward Islands and about 2240 miles (3600 km) east-southeast of Miami, Florida.\u00a0 Erika was moving toward the west at 20 m.p.h. (32 km\/h).\u00a0 The maximum sustained wind speed was 45 m.p.h. (70 km\/h) and there were gusts to 60 m.p.h. (95 km\/h).\u00a0 The minimum surface pressure was 1003 mb.<\/p>\n
The circulation around Erika is a little larger than the circulation around Danny was.\u00a0 There are several bands of thunderstorms near the center of circulation and the thunderstorms are generating upper level divergence in all directions.\u00a0 Erika is moving over water where the Sea Surface Temperature is near 27.5\u00b0C and it will gradually move over warmer SSTs as it moves west.\u00a0 Erika is moving at 20 m.p.h. and that is about the upper limit for storms that intensify over the tropical Atlantic Ocean.\u00a0 Currently the low level winds and upper level winds are blowing at nearly the same speed.\u00a0 So, there is not much vertical wind shear.\u00a0 However, if Erika were to move toward the west faster, then vertical wind shear could be more significant.\u00a0 As long as Erika does not move too fast, the environment is favorable for intensification and Danny intensified rapidly over the same region a few days ago.\u00a0 When Erika enters the Caribbean Sea in two or three days, it could encounter the same upper level trough that sheared Danny apart.<\/p>\n
A subtropical ridge is steering Erika quickly toward the west and that same general steering motion is expected to continue for the next two or three days.\u00a0 Erika could be approaching the northern Leeward Islands in about 48 hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vertical wind shear weakened Tropical Storm Danny as it entered the eastern Caribbean Sea and its circulation degenerated into a weak area of low pressure.\u00a0 However, a new tropical storm formed about a thousand miles east of the remnants of Danny and the National Hurricane Center designated it as Tropical Storm Erika.\u00a0 At 11:00 p.m. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[138,51,140,22,97,139],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1428,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427\/revisions\/1428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}