A reconnaissance plane found a small center of low pressure within a broader area of low pressure over the Bay of Campeche on Tuesday afternoon.\u00a0 The plane also found winds to near tropical storm force.\u00a0 At the 3:00 p.m. EDT the low was centered at latitude 19.3\u00b0N and longitude 93.7\u00b0W which put it about 350 miles northwest of Campeche, Mexico and about 850 miles west-southwest of Key West, Florida.\u00a0 The low was moving toward the east at 6 m.p.h.\u00a0 The maximum sustained wind speed was 38 m.p.h. and the minimum surface pressure of 1001 mb.<\/p>\n
Thunderstorms are forming mainly on the southern and eastern sides of the center.\u00a0 The low could be pulling in some of the drier air over the northern Gulf of Mexico, which may be limiting convection on the northwest side of the low.\u00a0 Westerly winds in the upper levels are also generating wind shear, which is inhibiting the development of the low.\u00a0 On the other hand, the low is over Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) that are warmer than 29\u00b0C and there is plenty of energy in the ocean to support the development of a tropical cyclone.\u00a0 The pressure has fallen about 5-6 mb in the past 12 hours and so the low appears to be getting stronger.\u00a0 If more thunderstorms form around the center of the low, it could be classified as a tropical depression or a tropical storm.<\/p>\n
The westerly winds in the upper and middle levels are pushing the low slowly toward the east.\u00a0 Guidance from the forecast models seems to be divided into two main possibilities.\u00a0 One group of models keeps the low relatively weak and forecasts it to move eastward across the Yucatan peninsula and into the northwestern Caribbean Sea before turning it northeastward and moving the low across the Bahamas.\u00a0 A second group of models predicts that the low will be a bit stronger and that the upper level flow will turn it northeastward sooner and move the low across southern Florida.\u00a0 If that second scenario occurs, the low could bring stronger winds and heavy rainfall to parts of south Florida.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A reconnaissance plane found a small center of low pressure within a broader area of low pressure over the Bay of Campeche on Tuesday afternoon.\u00a0 The plane also found winds to near tropical storm force.\u00a0 At the 3:00 p.m. EDT the low was centered at latitude 19.3\u00b0N and longitude 93.7\u00b0W which put it about 350 […]<\/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":[51,24,52,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182"}],"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=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayhobgood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}