Met Service Monitoring System in South-eastern Caribbean Sea

If you have been monitoring the weather reports over the past few days, you would notice that there is quite a bit of activity in the Atlantic. While Hurricane Fiona is in a north-northeast trajectory to the U.S., Belize’s National Met Service has been monitoring a low pressure system that has formed in the south-eastern Caribbean Sea. It is expected to continue on a west-north-westward path and there is a ninety percent probability that it will develop further. Today, Chief Meteorologist Ronald Gordon shares the details that they have at this time.

Ronald Gordon

Ronald Gordon, Chief Meteorologist

“The system has a high chance of becoming a tropical depression within the next two to five days as it moves generally to the west northwest across the eastern Caribbean Sea and enters the central Caribbean Sea. The system is disorganized as there is strong upper level winds over it at the moment, preventing it from becoming organized and developing. Those upper level winds are causing what we call high wind share, basically disrupting the thunderstorms from forming a closed circulation. However, all indications are that the wind share is going to weaken as the system enters the central Caribbean Sea and therefore it will have a better chance of becoming a tropical depression previously. Now in terms of the track, it is moving to the west northwest and eventually will move a bit more to the west and then forecast becomes a quite a divergent about three or four days after it enters the northwest Caribbean Sea. Some of the models take the system towards the northern Yucatán peninsula, north of Belize by the way, while others take it further away from the country towards the western tip of Cuba. Therefore, given that there is a widespread in these models, it indicates that there is a high level of uncertainty at the moment. And the reason for this is because you don’t have a closed circulation, you don’t have a low for the models to track. After the system has developed and becomes a tropical depression, we will have more confidence of where it will go because the models will be able to track it better.”