NOAA
This Atlantic hurricane season has set all kinds of records. Most notably, we’ve already been through the “K” name, with Tropical Storm Kyle forming off the coast of the Carolinas on August 14th. This beat the earliest ‘K’ storm ever, the very memorable Katrina in 2005, by 10 days.
For all the names thrown over there, however, most of these systems have been “fish storms” left over to sea. And only two have evolved into hurricanes, Hanna and Isaiah, and neither of these has advanced above Category 1 status. Scientists use a metric called Accumulated Cyclone Energy to measure the total activity of a season, infecting it in the duration and intensity of storms. Against this standard, 2020 has been quite active, but not quite so.
But now we come to the heart of the Atlantic hurricane season, which tends to go up at the end of August. This is when the tropical region between Africa and the Caribbean Sea typically reaches the most advantageous for development with warm seas and clean winds. This could allow a ‘train’ of storms to develop as atmospheric waves move off the west coast of Africa.
And that is exactly what we have seen with the development of Tropical Depressions 13 and 14 in the last 24 hours. Both systems are guaranteed to be a hurricane – indeed, both have factors such as dry air and windstorm to deal with – but based on their expected traces, we could see one or both of them starting next week in the Gulf of Mexico .
The 12z run of the August 20 GFS model shows two consecutive tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico beginning next Tuesday.
Weather Bell
It turns out that this would be pretty rare. According to Colorado State University hurricane scientist Phil Klotzbach has only been there twice in the last 150 years when there were two systems in the Gulf of Mexico where both were at least tropical storm surge. This happened on September 5, 1933 (Treasure Coast and Cuba-Brownsville) and on June 18, 1959 (Exemption and Beulah).
At no time have there been two systems that were both hurricane strength. It is possible that these depressions will reach hurricane status within the next five days, but with effect from Thursday morning, the National Hurricane Center is both forecast to become only strong tropical storms. This is 2020, of course all bets are off.
In any case, interests along the Gulf Coast of northern Mexico via Florida should take a good look at both of these depressions. For now, at least, probably the biggest threat is heavy rainfall next week. But the tropics love nothing more than surprising forecasters.
