Good morning! I'm wathcing the remnants of the first eastern Pacific Storm of the season, Agatha, this morning. The remnants of Agatha are currently spread out over a broad region from the western Caribbean to the west coast of Central America. There's been some devastating flooding across parts of Central America the past few days and today promises to be another day of very heavy rain for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize. That heavy rain will also move into areas of southeastern Mexico as the remnants of Agatha move back over the Caribbean.
There will only be a very minimal window for the remnants of Agatha to reorganize in the Caribbean. This morning, showers and storms are flaring again off the coast of Belize in an area where conditions are favorable for development (the top image shows the very weak wind shear -- darker blues/greens -- over the area where the remnants of the storm are now; just north of here, though, over the Yucatan east to Cuba and the Florida Straits, wind shear is very strong). With hostile upper level wind just north of where the storms are now, development of this system is unlikely in the Caribbean.
The second image I've included is the low-level steering level pattern, which favors the low-level moisture of ex-Agatha moving into the eastern Gulf and toward south Florida. The deepest moisture likely will be guided toward the east coast, but I think enough moves toward SWFL to increase our chance of rain in reverse west-to-east steering on Wednesday and Thursday. This means we could see some rain earlier in the day along the coast with the highest chances of rain moving inland with time. Of course, all bets are off if a more developed wave moves out of the Caribbean but this is exceedingly unlikely with the strong wind shear guarding the "entry gate" into the Gulf.
You can actually already see the tropical moisture pushing into the Yucatan Channel on this image, something known as Tropical Precipitable Water. The deep moisture is shaded in reds and oranges and you can see it starting to bubble up toward Cancun and eventually into the Gulf.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, things are pretty quiet although conditions are favorable for development across a good chunk of the basin -- surprising for so early in the season. Some models hint at a possible area to watch over the far southern Caribbean off the South American coast later this week and into the weekend, but any development there would stay way to the south. Elsewhere, none of our models indicate any other areas to watch over the next 5-7 days.
Brian
