August’s site sponsor: Bellaire Dermatology

A new month means a new sponsor for Space City Weather, and I’m pleased to announce that Bellaire Dermatology has agreed to support this site for the entire month of August.

(Bellaire Dermatology)

Thanks to their generous support we can provide all of our weather content for free, and without advertisement, for the entire month of August. The advantage of the sponsorship model is that we are under no pressure to generate web traffic for the sake of web traffic—so there’s no hype, no click bait and no nonsense—even though we’re in the midst of hurricane season.

If you appreciate that, please consider Bellaire Dermatology for all your skin care needs.

Welcome to August, the dead of summer in Houston.

Long-time Houston residents will know the month to really fear, in terms of heat, humidity, and drought—not to mention very strong hurricanes—is August. I’ll have more later this week on why August is this region’s hottest month, but for now just know that it is. August is a month to be survived in Houston, as we await the beginning of fall in late September. And this week will be a typical August in Houston.

Today

Upper-level high pressure will begin building over Houston today, but there’s a chance we may squeeze a few showers under the pressure later this afternoon when the sea breeze lights up. I don’t think coverage will be that great, and I expect showers that do develop to be short lived. Highs will be in the mid- to upper-90s.

Tuesday and Wednesday

With high pressure dominating we’ll see mostly sunny days with highs in the upper 90s. Some inland areas may flirt with 100 degrees. Lows in the upper 70s.

Texas will lie under a ridge of high pressure this week, which will heat us up. (Weather Bell)
Texas will lie under a ridge of high pressure this week, which will heat us up. (Weather Bell)

(Space City weather thanks Bellaire Dermatology, our sponsor for August.)

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Tropics: Invest 97L still spinning, but probably not bound for Texas

After Matt’s thorough tropical update on Saturday, and notably the area of interest known as Invest 97L, I thought I’d provide a shorter update today.

The system has now crossed over the Leeward Islands into the Caribbean Sea, and it continues to move westward, likely bringing winds and rains to Puerto Rico today. The National Hurricane Center continues to predict a 70 percent chance that this system develops into a tropical depression or storm within five days.

And after that? In the post Matt pointed toward two scenarios for what happens to 97L if it makes it into the Gulf of Mexico by around next Friday, or so. The first is that a fairly strong ridge over the southern United States keeps the tropical system to the south of Texas, confined to the Bay of Campeche. This solution was favored by the European model. The other possibility was that this ridge would shift east in about a week, allowing 97L to follow a more northwesterly track toward Texas. However the GFS model which had shown this weakness, appears to be trending toward a stronger ridge.

Models begin to align?

The image below shows the ensemble forecast from the GFS model this morning (06z run) which essentially means the model is run a number of different times, with slight different initial conditions. You can see that the majority of solutions now keep the storm well to the south of Texas.

GFS ensemble forecast for tropical low locations early Monday morning. (Weather Bell)
GFS ensemble forecast for tropical low locations early Monday morning. (Weather Bell)

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Weekend Tropical Update

It’s still a bit early in the game, but we wanted to bring you up to speed on a couple tropical disturbances in the Atlantic that are driving “chatter” in social media and elsewhere about how they may or may not impact Texas and elsewhere. Let’s dig in.

“Invest 96L”

Before a tropical disturbance becomes a depression or named storm, for the purposes of running models and collecting data, the National Hurricane Center uses the designation “Invest” (90-99) to describe a system. Basically, it just means an area they’re investigating for possible future development. Invests are common and have a sequential numbering scheme that repeats through the season.

With that in mind, we have two “invests” out there. The first one is 96L, a system about 400-500 miles southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. It’s not terribly well organized, but it has a slight chance to develop over the next couple days.

Invest 96L slogs across the far eastern Atlantic, not terribly well organized. (NOAA/NHC)
Invest 96L slogs across the far eastern Atlantic, not terribly well organized. (NOAA/NHC)

 

Reliable weather models are mostly unenthused with the future prospects of Invest 96L. I haven’t seen any reason to think this will develop into much of anything, and its long term prospects likely do not include the Gulf, so no worries here for us.

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