Debby Update. Busy Pacific. Tropical Discussion. Watching the Water Warm Up in the Atlantic. Female Co Pilots on Hurricane Hunter Plane Into Hector.

As for information on Debby I'll defer to Mike.

He's got all the right graphics....

...in all the right places.

Let's face it that basically the Atlantic is in hibernation mode while the Pacific is bursting with color and named storms. And, this is totally natural as it is very unnatural to have both basins hot to trot at the same time and ready for the races. I grew up near a racetrack and this to me is the way of life. Those of us living near Tropical Park Racetrack had to wait for Hialeah Racetrack to close before "our track" opened and that meant sadly more traffic in the area for our parents, but beautiful race horses brought in and exercised every morning adjacent to our walk to school that was a neat treat for us. No I wasn't late to school but we did leave early to watch the horses exercise; horses that would go on to win big races and become famous. It was the ebb and flow of life growing up in Miami near a racetrack. Everything has a season in life from horse tracks to mangoes ripening on heavily laden trees to tropical waves doing practice runs before the real waves come off of Africa later in the season. 

But to be honest this year has been an odd year in that people in Oklahoma and Kansas watched the skies and worried on Tornado Season when the chasers descend onto the Plains ready to chase and do their thing. Yet this year the Tornado Season went North and Twisters formed in odd places such as Montana and Massachusetts while luckily for Oklahoma and Kansas very few tornadoes formed. Ironically I'll wager to guess that many motel chains and restaurants that cater to the storm chasers miss their business. It's a economic bonus there during Chaser Season much like Tourist Season is in Miami or Beach Season is along the sleepy coastal towns of Texas and the Carolinas that love tourists but dislike hurricanes coming to visit.

Last year was an extremely unusually busy hurricane season when anything that formed in the Atlantic Ocean became a Major Hurricane bringing death and destruction to many places. I really can't say I miss the "good old days of 2017" though my Miami kids did evacuate and come visit us in North Carolina so again that worked out nice for us. I'll always remember my 4 year old grandson Benjamin in a store shopping cart surrounded by bright red plastic gas holders for them to take back to Miami where gas was hard to find after Hurricane Irma. 

There were signs that the Atlantic that was colder than normal in June and July this year, however it is heating up as we enter August just as "climo" kicks in normally every year. Some years it is warmer than other years and other years it's cooler than normal and this too is normal. So within the framework of this being all normal within a year that has brought us weather patterns that is not normal we need to wonder on what the 2018 Atlantic Hurricane Season will deliver once all signs are go for lift off. In most years that does not begin until September with a flurry of tropical action noticeable in the second part of August.

Note the first map shows yellow in the Atlantic down the road.

Water temperatures warming up close to our coast.

I don't worry on why the water isn't hotter near Africa.

It is beginning to warm up.

As it always does from the Equator North.

I worry on areas close to the US coast that are Hot now.

More on this later at the end of today's post.

As for the crop of Pacific storms it's worth noting that if Hector was not edging closer to Hawaii where it will indeed pass to the South of the island chain then the big story would be about the FUJIWARA like interaction of two hurricanes closer to land in the EPAC. If Hurricane Katrina had not gone on to slam into Mississippi and Louisiana the big story of that year would have been that Miami suffered a direct hit from a hurricane named Katrina. Weather like the news has a pecking order of importance when it comes to what sells and how headlines grab our attention. Intensity sells and an intense storm tracking close to Hawaii that is already in the news with the ongoing volcano has heightened the interest in Hector to near record status for a Pacific storm. But the drama of John and Ileana was ignored as the stronger storm always wins out and swallows up the energy of the weaker one. And that goes back to the early part of this blog. You cannot have two busy basins and you cannot have two busy storms that close together. It's all about the flow of energy from one region of the world to another, the balancing out of the atmosphere and moving tropical energy from one point to another. When one area is up then one area is down, when one storm is strong the other storm gets blown apart and when shear in one region is strong hurricanes don't form until the shear dies down.

My real question for this year is not how many storms we will have or how much ACE we will have but where the storms will form, thrive, intensify and possibly make landfall later in the Hurricane Season. And, the over abundance of weather in the Northern Latitudes from floods in the region from Pennsylvania to Maryland and the displacement of the Tornado Season north to Montana and New England make me concerned on hurricanes traveling further North this year searching for once quiet beaches or busy metropolitan areas to make landfall. Maybe they will just take aim at the Mid Atlantic or Cape Cod sticking out into the ocean threatening storms in every season to hit it with their best shot and then they will slide away like Hector is doing despite all the media fuss on a hurricane possibly hitting a volcano. I'm also worried about the Texas/Louisiana area for several reasons that I'll talk about down the road but not today.

Some of my storm chaser friends that love to chase hurricanes in exotic locations passed on Hector and when they did I knew that aside from some fringe effects Hawaii was safe from Hector's eye wall and most dangerous weather. My friends like to chase real hurricane landfalls and be in the eye; they don't travel across the world for fringe effects. Chasers are kind of all or nothing intense types that don't settle for mediocre easily.

Another big news story today in the weather world is that one of the Hurricane Hunter planes that flew into Hector. It kind of bothers me that this IS news as it would seem like it should be just another flight into a hurricane and yet it seems it was not. It's a milestone worth reminding people, because if there is some young girl out there who is crazy about hurricanes and flight I wouldn't want her to think that it's a man's job and that she couldn't aspire to flying into hurricanes. I also wouldn't want her to think that she could not grow up, graduate and get a job at the NHC as a Hurricane Forecaster or even serve as Director of the NHC. For many reasons men tend to fill those jobs though that is changing. I've said before that they are not paid enough for what they do and I'm thinking many women who excel at science, math and computers look towards the private sector for good jobs in the same way my son and one of his best friends Lina did when they graduated from college. They were Co-Captains of a Robotic Team in High School that won 1st place in the State of Florida and placed in the top 20 in Houston in the National competition. Lina, born in Russia but raised in North Miami Beach, was Salutatorian of her very large high school class. They both took jobs in Seattle for large firms that pay well and offer room for advancement. My son went to work for Amazon and left after two years to go to work for another company doing what he loves. Note my son loves meteorology and is want to make computerized weather models in his spare time but he wanted a job that made money and gave security to his family. Women, like Lina who works for Boeing, took a job that allowed her and her tech husband to buy a very large home in the Seattle area and raise her two small children. 

America really needs to upgrade the money given to the agencies that provide satellites that are not broken and models that do not consistently come in behind the Euro Model. It's embarrassing, frustrating and upsetting to work with broken models that cannot work at full capacity and to have to use everyone else's weather models because they do a better job than our much aligned GFS model. That needs to change and the women paid women and  men who go to work for the NWS and NOAA needs to be increased so we can compete with private industry that lures them away with better jobs and even better incentives. Just my thoughts. But kudos to those two women who piloted the plane into the hurricane and that broke a barrier. Maybe someone can make a movie about that!

Lastly thanks for your patience with yesterday's long rambling blog post that was a bit of a dare to just sit down and write, reflecting on life during the quiet times in the tropics. Kind of a writing prompt of sorts and sometimes it's good to just write and let it flow. Energy needs to flow and I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure come September and maybe even early October people will be wishing the energy from the tropics would just stop flowing and that winter would begin as that is the way of the world. People don't enjoy what they have they look back to what they had and wish for time to move faster to get to the next season that is just around the corner. 

Besos BobbiStorm

@bobbistorm on Twitter

Ps My mother liked Lena Horne, she said she was a ground breaker with a beautiful voice and she was right.