Gulf Coast Might Learn Hurricane Season Ain't Over; Meanwhile, Cloudy Vermont

Some potential tracks of wannabe Tropical Storm
Michael. It may or may not form, and don't
assume this forecast scenario is exactly right.
It could easily change. 

We're past the peak of hurricane season, but we've still got a ways to go before it's over. True to form, things might be heating up again in the tropical storm department.

In the late spring, then again in early fall, something called Central American Gyre often forms. Sounds scary, doesn't it? Well, it can be.

This gyre, which we will get all geeky about and called a CAG. is a broad, wet circulation of air that gets going in the southwestern Caribbean Sea. Our buddy CAG can produce torrential rain and terrible flooding in Central America.

Our CAG is also good at spitting out tropical storms and hurricanes in the Caribbean and off the west coast of Africa.  CAG seems poised to create a new tropical storm, which would be named Michael, if it does form.

Strong upper level winds around CAG will probably make any tropical storm fairly slow to develop, but a particularly concentrated area of bad weather in this region this morning seemed on the cusp of turning into a tropical depression, which is usually a precursor to a tropical storm or hurricane.

As always, the path of wannabe Michael is uncertain, but early indications are it wants to drift northward somwhere between Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and western Cuba and then eventually toward maybe the Florida Panhandle.

It's still unclear if wannabe Michael will get it's act together to form a hurricane, or just be a sloppy mess of downpours if and when it reaches the United States. But it's something to watch for next week.

CLOUDY VERMONT

We had a really sunny summer and early autumn in Vermont but lately the clouds are winning out.

Wispy clouds gave us a gorgeous sunrise over St. Albans, Vermont
Friday morning, but the clouds later increased, and we mostly
stuck under the clouds for the next few days.

That's typical. As we move through the autumn, it tends to get cloudier and cloudier until we hit November and December, when the days are so short and the skies are pretty much always overcast, which is pretty yucky.

But we deal with it every year.  

The clouds won out last night, which was actually a good thing. Had it stayed clear, as many forecasters had predicted, we would have had quite a bit of frost around. But the clouds kept us warmer than expected.

Keep those gardens cranking as long as you can, right?

The price we'll pay is a cloudy weekend. A cold front is slowly sagging southward, which will create plenty of clouds and scattered showers.

As the front sinks southward through the area Sunday, it will keep the clouds around. Also, an inversion is likely to develop.

Usually, the air gets colder the higher you go up in elevation. In an inversion, it gets warmer as you go up. That warm air on top of the cold air seals in the clouds, so you get a dreary mix of fog, low clouds and drizzle, which appears to be the fate for most of us on Sunday.

During the summer, the strong sun usually can break up an inversion by mixing up the air. In those cases the sun comes out by afternoon. But now, the sun is lower and weaker, so it won't be able to break up the inversion. You probably won't need your sunglasses on Sunday.

The clouds and drizzle look like they might continue into Monday. Then the inversion will finally break up. We might get some sun next week but it won't be wall to wall sun. It will get warmer, though.

Don't despair if you don't like the clouds. We still usually get spells of bright, sunny weather through the rest of the month of October and into early November. I'm sure that will happen this year.