Caribbean Hurricane Network

Active Tropical Systems: Tropical Storm Cristobal
Atlantic Hurricane Season is from June 1 - November 30

GOES Satellite - Zoomed in on the Caribbean (19:20 UTC, 24 minutes ago)
Scale bar (lower right) is 250 miles. [more satellite imagery].
See storm-centered satellite image and loop in the tools section below (if available)

Tuesday, June 2, 2020 09:43AM PDT - Cristobal

Tropical Depression 3 has been upgraded to Tropical Storm Cristobal. This is the first time ever (=since 1851) that 3 named storms have formed this early. 2016 was close, with the third storm forming June 5, and in 2012 the third storm formed on June 17. Don't be fooled, this is a very dangerous storm. Because it is hardly moving it will cause prolonged periods of torrential rainfall in Mexico and Central America. There already have been deaths reported due to flooding in Guatemala and El Salvador. It doesn't look like it will start moving out of the area until Friday... I have shifted the satellite image above a bit more to the west to get a better view at this storm. -Gert

Monday, June 1, 2020 21:07PM EDT - TD#3/Cristobal

Good evening all,

I trust everyone is doing well, staying safe and healthy while riding out the pandemic that envelopes the world in different degrees and stages. Please be safe, stay aware, and prepare. BTW, looting and violence will not bring or realize justice. Looting a 50" TV will not assist getting justice; that's just taking greedy advantage of the situation. Back to the weather.

Gert, Thank you for 25 years of silver anniversary for providing a forum in which to enrich, enlighten, inform, sometimes chastise (on my part), and educate the Caribbean and others about the Atlantic Hurricane Season and it's contents which includes, watches, warnings, perils, preparation, devastation, relief and recovery, etc.... Thank you also for allowing me to participate on this site since 1997 I believe. I enjoy the weather while sharing what I know and observe with others with the hope it helps someone and saves lives. Yes, Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Dorian in the last three years have been eye openers to say the least. Having personally went through Irma and Maria within 12 days tests your will, your mind, your resources, your beliefs and trust. Just saying, I love the weather but Mother Nature, please take all the next 20 years worth of storms OTS aka make them fish storms to talk about, not remember.Â

So, June 1st, the first official day of the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season starts today but tropical activity, while minor, has been prolific and surprising already in the month of May. TS Arthur, makes a not so surprising appearance along the SE coast brushing the Outer Banks while TS Bertha, who would have never been recognized before the 1970's, rapidly sloshed into South Carolina. TS Bertha was basically a Sunday visit to the buffet: One hour from designation as a TS to landfall. Second shortest on record by 15 minutes.Â

Now, we have TD#3. Soon to be TS Cristobal, it will linger and lurk for the next few days around the Bay of Campeche. Heavy rains and flooding will be Central Americas issue no matter what. Future tracks are uncertain. West into Mexico. Or, Saturday a TS in the GOMEX.Then where? Beyond uncertain. So, anywhere along the GOM and Florida need to pay attention, heed, and prepare. This one has no zeroed in on point yet.

Bottom line prepare no matter what. La Nino is non existent. The Atlantic, unless wind shear and Saharan Dust are seriously prevalent, will be highly active. I have been saying way before TWC and others: It only takes one to land on your island or house. I find it funny they are now using that statement. However, it is true no matter who says it.Â

TS Cristobal which is almost inevitable, has some place to land with evil intentions. Central America's issues with this system will be morphed into a GOM problem of where, what as and when. Landfall is a certainty once in the GOM as there is no real exit lane unless any of them dipped south and exited the Straits of Florida into the Atlantic which I believe has ever happened yet.Â

Have a safe and healthy evening. Seems like it's time to strap on the tropical seat belt!

Dave

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Monday, June 1, 2020 2:11AM EDT - Silver Anniversary

Update 5PM AST: Tropical depression 3 formed right where we would expect it from the plot below, down in the Bay of Campeche, off Mexco. It is expected to become a tropical storm soon (Cristobal). It is going to move pretty slowly, so the rain will be the biggest problem. The advisories indicate up to 20 inch locally!

A huge milestone, this is the 25th year for this website! I started it back in 1996, when I realized that the mainstream news coverage of hurricanes in the Caribbean is largely absent or too generalized to be worth anything. The 'internet' was very different back then, blogging was not a word and Google didn't even exist yet. We were using the Altavista search engine and Mosaic browsers... A lot has changed, and news is easier to get nowadays, including first hand reports through Facebook. But for now, this website still fills a need.

A special thanks to Dave McDermott who helps me with writing hopefully easy to understand updates. Thanks to all the special hurricane correspondents on the islands. Without all these volunteers this website would be pretty boring! Some have been with us for a very long time. And of course, since there are considerable costs associated with this high traffic website, thank you all who have donated money, esp. the ones who have given year after year! Thank you all!

Another thing that came through recently and which I have been trying to get for many, many years is the ownership of the domain name stormcaribe.com, since many people like to add an 'e' to stormcarib. No one was doing something useful with that domain, but somehow different registrars kept renewing it, and I was unable to steal it when the registration expired. At one point is was even a porn site! When you type in stormcaribe.com by mistake you will automatically be redirected to stormcarib.com.

OK, today marks the first day of hurricane season. We have already had two storms. Pretty unusual, it only happened 6 times before in the last 170 years (see my earlier post). Although it seems to become more common, since half of the cases happened in the last 10 years. Hmm, I wonder what the cause of this could be... Many of the forecasts predict an above normal season. Pretty soon Colorado State will come out with their updated one. A lot of it will depend on the ENSO status. El Nino is good (suppresses hurricanes), La Nina is bad. The latest ENSO forecast from 2 weeks ago predicts mostly neutral conditions through August (65% chance, with 25% chance of La Nina and 10% El Nino). In September chances for an La Nina are going up a bit (50% neutral, 40% La Nina, 10% El Nino). So not really optimal and this is probably the main reason for the above average hurricane activity season forecasts. At the time of the last forecast by Colorado State La Nina chances were a bit lower (45% neutral, 35% La Nina, 20% El Nino), so I suspect that the number of storms they forecast will go up a bit. Below the names of the storms and pronunciation used this season:

Name           Pronunciation    Name            Pronunciation
-------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur         AR-thur          Laura           LOOR-ruh
Bertha         BUR-thuh         Marco           MAR-koe
Cristobal      krees-TOH-bahl   Nana            NA-na
Dolly          DAH-lee          Omar            OH-mar
Edouard        ed-DWARD         Paulette        pawl-LET
Fay            fay              Rene            re-NAY
Gonzalo        gohn-SAH-loh     Sally           SAL-ee
Hanna          HAN-uh           Teddy           TEHD-ee
Isaias         ees-ah-EE-ahs    Vicky           VIH-kee
Josephine      JOH-seh-feen     Wilfred         WILL-fred
Kyle           KY-ull

Finally, I have updated the climatology section. Last time I did it was in 2011 so it was about time. A lot more work than I thought, since my scripts weren't really working anymore and I wanted to make nicer maps. I analyzed almost 1900 storm tracks from 1951-2019 (see image on the right). The climatology section contains over 600 webpages and over 4500 images. There are different sections: maps of storms that passed by your island, peak of the season for your island, five year analyses (are we seeing more storms lately?), hurricane capital of the Caribbean, and more. Also included is an analyses of where storms form for each month. Below is the map for June. In the last 76 years (since 1944) we had 57 storms form in June, 75% of them became 'just' tropical storms, no Category 4 or 5 hurricanes. More importantly, for us in the Caribbean it looks pretty good. Hope it holds true!

OK, this turned out to be a much longer post than I anticipated, so much new news :-). Everybody good luck this season! Hopefully things will go back to more or less normal regarding COVID-19 soon, with tourists coming back to the islands! Stay safe and don't do stupid things! And if you are able to, consider making a donation to the website, so that it can continue for many years to come! -Gert

Storm Origins for June

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