Tropical Storm Alberto: Place your bets now!

According to Jeff Masters:

"Alberto is a fairly typical-looking June tropical storm. The satellite presentation is not very impressive this morning, with most of the deep convection lying to the east of the exposed center. Strong westerly winds associated with the subtropical jet stream are removing the deep convection from the center. This wind shear is creating a very hostile environment for Alberto to survive in, let alone strengthen. With the shear forecast to strengthen, I would not be surprised to see Alberto ripped apart tonight....The most likely scenario is that Alberto will hit the west coast of Florida as a weak tropical storm with maximum winds of 40 - 50 mph."

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=371&tstamp=200606#commenttop

His prediction: "I give Alberto a less than 5% chance of making hurricane status."

What's your prediction?

Boomer: "I bet 100 quatroos that Alberto becomes a Category 1 hurricane before landfall."

Let's hope neither does too much damage to the US.

hope for the best on this one.

...we probably have until the letter "D" or "E" before something big happens. Hurricane Dennis set records last year, so that's a reasonable guide of where we would start this year.

(crossing fingers)

Sod's Law say the painful bit of the season will be later, since we're expecting it.

I would like to add that here is yet another instance of strengthening in the face of high wind-shear:

I know we've had this discussion before, but here's new supporting evidence for the myserious Factor X which seems to have been introduced into hurricane dynamics starting with last year's hurricane season.

I started this thread half-facetiously because Jeff Masters has been off the mark since last year and now I just take it on faith that he's going to continue to make poor predictions when he uses conventional models.

Something has changed. The fact that we don't even know what that "something" may be is really distrubing.

We're missing something here, folks! Anyone here have theories about why these storms are shredding the conventional models? What's the X-factor?

than current models capture. If so, then SST is the X-factor. We already know it, but there's some critical bits of interaction we don't know.

I think insensitivity to upper level shear is going to turn out to be key to unlocking this puzzle. The core of deep convection is stronger somehow. More robust, harder to disrupt.

There's an interesting story behind the aerodynamics, and friction at the boundary between atmosphere and ocean. A naive model of friction between air and ocean predicts that no storm should ever have wind speeds greater than about 25 knots. Clearly, that naive model is wrong. What they eventually figured out is that ocean-spray a few feet above the surface actually forms a lubricant between ocean and air. The friction "brake" behaves non-linearly. It goes away just when it should get stronger.

I think there's some other effect like that going on here. There's a "brake" in the current models that isn't actually present in real life, and rising SSTs have something to do with it. But maybe it's some completely different thing. Increasing temperature gradient between surface atmosphere and upper atmosphere? Driving the convection with more force?

78 millibars in 10 hours- all the way down to a record 882 mbar was just insane.

Then that sucker hit the sheer and still kept most of its strength.



The models sure didn't describe that one well....