Invest 94L is well on her way to becoming TS Erika. 

In other news, signs of a long, cold winter are all over, especially on the eastern seaboard.

The nice cool temperatures the SE United States got yesterday and today will make the invest head out to the atlantic.  It might get a name, but it won’t be a big deal.

This morning, I noticed that the air is holding a chill.  It isn’t coming with its own, but it’s holding it well.  Fall is going to come early, I’m pretty sure.

This makes me want to go do fall stuff.  Stuff like drinking dark beer, eating savory thick food, having fires, and driving.  This fall, I’d really like to see Fredericksburg and New Orleans again.  I think I should also see Destin.

Mmm, fall.

There’s a nice pretty rotation behind the wave just coming off Africa.  Looks like a decent chance of it spinning up into something more fun.  Guess we’ll know more this time tomorrow.

You can't see the rotation from this water vapor image, but see the funkiness between the canaries and africa? Yeah. Rar.

Ana died with a whimper.  Claudette did too.  Bill is getting big, but is only a threat to Bermuda.

There’s an un-invested area of interest just off the yucatan (about 85’W 20’N) with rotation and pressure characteristics that make it worth attention.  Steering currents would send it to the central Texas coast.  It likely won’t develop into much.

Ana is still a generic threat to the gulf

Bill is headed off to the Atlantic to die:

Invest 91L might become Claudette in the next six hours and looks to come ashore over Pensacola:

Wow this has been one active day.  It might be easier to whine about what isn’t affected right now.   Okay here we go:

Invest 91L is off Florida and tracking for New Orleans or so.  Might become a TD, maybe.

TS Bill grew FAST and is well formed way off Africa in the Atlantic.  You can also see the next area of interest in the wave coming off Africa now.  This might become Hurricane Claudette:

Bill should easily become a hurricane but is now tracking up east of Florida and might be a fish:

TS Ana, of course, is a day and a half off Puerto Rico and tracking for NOLA too:

So, busy day.  Wonder what tomorrow will bring.

Both are currently tracking to the Gulf inside Florida.  Okay, the-future-Bill will need to shift a little, but it sounds good…

TS Ana:

TD3 to be Hurricane Bill:

Okay, maybe Ana, but I’m thinking the leading area of interest has potential to spin up and swing north.

My completely unofficial amateur prediction is a north to central mexico hit by a cat 2 or 3.  The gulf is blazing hot in places, so there’s some energy available.  The steering currents are all screwy from the previous invests that are up by Florida now – we can get more accuracy when they calm down.  With any luck, we can get this puppy up a little north to Texas in a couple of weeks.

Get your water bottled!

From the NHC:

I still think it will go out to die in the atlantic.  Oh well, maybe she’ll make TS Ana.

Invest 99L is trying to spin up over the eastern Atlantic ocean.  I’d put very good money on this one being, at best, a minor named storm, skipping up off the east cost, and dying in the north Atlantic.

I hate this year’s hurricane season.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gtwo/gtwo_atl_sub.shtml?area1#contents

It’s the only one circled, below (Fig 1).  I told you guys to watch it Wednesday when it was hopping off Africa.  Looks like others are on the bandwagon.  The steering currents are potentially favorable to bring it over the Yucatan and up the Texas coast.  It will have to make it across some moderate shear off Central America (Fig 2), assuming the shear stays in place, which is likely for a week.  It’s also lined up for a good shot of hot water off the NE of South America, extending west from Guyana (Fig 3), though the Gulf has been cooling a little and western temps are low enough to moderate any storm.

This is still a couple of weeks out, so don’t place much stock in this at all.  As always, be prepared for hurricane season, but don’t go crazy.

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I wanted to write, but nothing came to me.  The feeling reminded me of walking through the desert with an empty canteen, but constantly thinking about taking a drink any way.  You’ll eventually do it out of habit or compulsion, no matter what your rational thoughts say.  Sometimes you’ll even get a trickle of water out of it, a sliver that more reminds you of water than gives any sort of quenching.  Yet you swallow any way, because it’s what you have.

Drinks had been played thin, boosted my tolerance of alcohol and caffeine to a level that cracked even my apathy.  I wanted to not drink more than I wanted to do something interesting.  I also wanted to be alone, which was fairly normal, but knew I needed other people around, which was not at all normal.  The saving grace was that I had make-work that gave me something to pretend to do around people that I didn’t have to talk to.  That probably spared my sanity a good bit of stress while doing nothing for my dwindling savings.

This was an inflection point in my reality.  Not the good kind, where one chooses between two paths that make them a better person and their life a better experience.  This was a lower bound, where you gently bottom out before building momentum and returning to a life that could at least pass for normal.  I sat and considered a few courses I could take for the day.  Most of them involved some sort of exercise, like walking or boating, but all of them tired me out by the thinking of them, before I could begin and gain some tangible exhaustion.  I left to let a distraction find me.

At the creek, there were rocks in the bed below the trail.  Nobody was sure where they had come from.  They were large and natural, not concrete rip-rap that you might find near an old construction site, diminutive monuments of a sunburned driver who wanted to see his children ten minutes sooner, and took those ten minutes from the time it would have cost to drive to the dumping grounds.  There was no construction nearby, and they were the wrong kinds of rocks. These were cut from a stream with an actual current, where a subdued torrent of silted water slowly carved them out, then brushed their edges to an eggshell finish, and were out of place in the coastal plains. 

I’d been to this spot several times over the past few months.  Each time I passed the trail, it was closer to the water.  The at the last passing, I realized it was the bank moving, and not the trail.  Soon the trail would be severed, only an imaginary line down the bank, through the water, and back up the bank.  The rocks wanted to be there.  I didn’t know exactly where, and I couldn’t fathom exactly why, but the rocks had a need and I couldn’t ignore it.

The cairn started out small, as all cairns must be started.  My mortar was weaker than that of a pile that grew over a hundred years, but it was enough to let the rocks pile up.  I tasted dust and sweat and an absence of humidity.  The air wasn’t heavy with water like it normally is, and tasted more of dying microflora than moisture ripped from standing bodies of water.  There weren’t many bodies of water left standing or otherwise.  There was more grit on my hands than in my mouth, which was good, but the balance was slowly tipping.  It became a long, unsteady farce of race.  Working harder made it worse, as did working faster.  And it was a sort of work born from the compulsion that glowed from that carpet of rocks by the creek.  It wasn’t required of me, but it had to be done. 

My doldrums were buried under the stack of foreign rocks.  I put them on the edge of the path, nearer the water.  The trail would grow around the rocks, the creek would keep its distance.  I understood why the rocks wanted to be there, and it made my labor easier.  The stack grew, until the all the stony brothers were in their new home.  I hadn’t realized it until my race was over, but I was exhausted.  I couldn’t hear my arms over the crying of the rocks, but once the rocks were satisfied, my arms plaintive cry rang in my ears.  Even if it wasn’t for such, I appeased them, sitting against a tree and crossing them over my knees. 

In the shade of the tree, I watched the rocks lounge in their new home, imagining them shuffling around and finding comfortable spots to set.  After a few minutes I stopped imagining, and the rocks kept shuffling.  A rock half way up the pile tipped onto a new side.  I idly wondered at this, because the rocks didn’t have any means of locomotion that I could recall.  Its brother followed its lead, and tumbled to the bottom of the pile.  I watched with a resigned interest as more followed, taking the bank and half of the trail with them.  All that was left of the cairn was a bite in the trail and an expanse of rocks trailing into the creek.

I wanted to write, sitting in the shade, but nothing came to me.  But I knew where the rocks had come from.