Tuesday, August 11 (9:00 AM)

(My Location: click on image to enlarge and read.)

This morning: Phase 1 of the transition began this morning around 4am as a portion of the surface ridge axis sank to Central Florida. Aloft the axis is near Jacksonville which tells the story for the day right off the bat. Due to its close proximity surface winds will be light today and dictated solely by seabreeze onset. The only cloud in the sky right now is right over my apartment thanks to "Cape Magic".

Late morning thru early afternoon will be characterized with a slight increase in low level clouds and possibly an isolated shower in the vicinity of the Cape. Otherwise, any other rain along the east coast should fall from Stuart and points south.

Afternoon and early evening: It will be a little warmer today due to compressional heating, with max temp probably around 1-2pm. Once the influence of the seabreeze is felt temperatures will steady off if not fall 1-3 degrees east of US1 until about 5pm when thereafter diurnal cooling until 10pm will commence. Chances for decent storms don't look good anywhere today in the state, but if I had to pick a spot it would be from S. Central Okeechobee County toward Ft Meyers after 2:30pm until 7pm. Storm motion will be a slow westward drift with outflow boundaries and chaotic motion not much a contributing factor.

Upcoming Days: There is a tropical wave approaching from the ESE that the models are bringing into SE-E Central Florida Saturday morning. The reality as to whether this will actually occur is contingent upon whether the continental trough digging south just along the Cumberland Plateau has enough Umpf-sion to break the ridge axis across us...leaving a part to the west and the other part to the east...leaving Florida in "no-mans land" pressure pattern wise. But it has to lift out or weaken significantlyin the process to allow the wave some leeway. If this happens the wave should have enough in it to penetrate right on up that alley across the East Florida Coast. However, if the ridge can't make the split the wave will likely stay south and fizzle. THEN, if it can't make the split will there be enough in the trough to increase or thunderstorm chances? My thinking is that climatologically, the ridge will hold and we will see nothing from EITHER system :- ( !! In any case, it will be interesting to see what materializes... and this should become more evident in tonights model runs. There is yet another wave (now TD2) to the east and north of this one, but that one won't come into play. But before then we still have to deal with the potential for thundershowers most likely late Wednesday and Thursday. Steering currents will be from the SSW so anything the pops close to the coast has a chance of crossing the intercoastal, particularly on Thursday. Friday will be much like late Wednesday, with isolated to scattered thundershowers remaining mostly west of US1.

The tropics: (these are my thoughts only, please reference the National Hurricane Center via the link in the "Oft Visited Links" for official info). The GFS still has the next wave in the series following TD2 (the "fish storm") on the same forecast track and intensity outlook as yesterday's run, although the track is a tad to the east of yesterday's outlook. On this course, it would follow a track VERY similar to that of Hurricane Floyd of 1991.

Floyd was a large and intense Cape Verde hurricane that seriously threatened Florida. It neared the threshold of category five intensity on the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale as it approached the Bahamas.As a mid- to upper-tropospheric trough over the eastern United States eroded the subtropical ridge over the extreme western Atlantic, Floyd continued to turn gradually to the right. The center of the hurricane paralleled the central Florida coast, passing about 95 n mi east of Cape Canaveral around 0900 UTC 15 September. By the afternoon of the 15th, Floyd was abeam of the Florida/Georgia border and headed northward toward the Carolinas. It continued north and struck the coast of North Carolina and moved up the United States east coast into New England.