Boston Bulldog

Rafael is rapidly unraveling. The only November major hurricane in the Gulf (besides Kate). One for the record books

Impressive performance by Rafael this evening. Major at 10pm EST I bet. This must be the most menacing looking storm in terms of location to not even have a single TS watch or warning issued. No intermediate advisories either!

I am interested to know why this may be a mirage, tropical forcings perhaps? At first glance the high-latitude dynamics seem like they would be sufficient to temporarily tighten up the lambda on the continental rossby waveguide

A bit of a trend emerging over the last day for mid-month on the GEFS. The EPS has shown this trough anomaly on the eastern half of the country for a little while as well. Refreshing to see long range changes, if still very far out. This potential break in the ridge will likely transient in nature as this feature propogates quickly across the CONUS.

Seen this hurricane season take a few times, the NOAA forecast has verified across named storms, total hurricanes and major hurricanes.

Extremely unlikely makes landfall in Texas. The only scenario where this storm gets close to Texas is if the storm gets ripped to shreds by shear and the LLC decouples. Cold water on approach to land is also in place. Breathe in, breathe out Hurricane Ida (2009) repeat without the secondary peak intensity IMO

The hemispheric rossby wave evolution to maintain this pattern is quite remarkable. Happy to get this out of the way in November, myself and many others would be quite angsty if this weirdly persistent pattern showed up in January. The consistent deposit of vorticity back into the western trough really drives the persistence of our downstream ridge. Very impressive how the wave structure strikes the perfect balance between trough attenuation on the low-end of vort advection, and wave breaking for high-end advection. Instead we get stasis. An impressive traffic jam of blocking downstream also slows propagation just in time for vorticity to go reinforce the pattern along the wave axes. Long story short, this ridge doesn’t want to go easy. Again, hoping for a trigger from the W-Pac to reshuffle the deck.

Exactly, we are pretty locked into eastern ridging for the foreseeable future. Sure, we can get a few cool shots in from various sources here or there, but we need wholesale teleconnection changes for real progress away from the hostile rossby wave configuration we have. Subseasonal indicators are pretty iron-clad right now across the upper latitudes, and tropical forcings are not helping. A nicely timed recurving typhoon could be the trigger for changes sooner than modeled. Until that happens, or other forcings flip key indices, semi-consistent bursts of winter will be confined to the ADK High Peaks region, the Green Mountain spine, the Whites through Pittsburg, and the Mahoosucs/Aroostock county

I would caution against getting excited about the long range deterministic models showing some “winter-like” storm activity. Ensembles are still very hostile with the ridging through mid month, maybe we can squeeze out a cool shot in about 10 days on the backside of the troughing anomaly over the Maritimes. I would watch for some cutters after mid month with hints of a -PNA showing up. Honestly that’s progress toward a cool season pattern, considering where we are starting this month.

Organization is there, convection remains quite shallow. I think they could have upgraded at 5pm, but NHC might be looking for more robust convection before doing so.

Really a pretty awful look for the next few weeks for colder temps. Yuck

Hard to tell with lack of quality radar, but looks like a direct strike on Grand Turk

Current motion seems likely to have the tiny core miss Providenciales, which is fortunate. Grand Turk may not be so lucky

Latest dropsonde shows Oscar on the cusp of category 2. No word on if this is rain affected yet, but Hazelton is giving credence to this result NHC needs to upgrade to hurricane and issue hurricane warnings immediately. It would be negligence if they don’t

3nm diameter for the eye… take that Milton! NHC special update: 70mph, 991mb