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  2. Tropics Hotting Up? (And Meet Chantal)

Tropics Hotting Up? (And Meet Chantal)

By cmooney on July 31, 2007.

The National Hurricane Center just named our third Atlantic storm, Chantal, off the eastern seaboard. Chantal is heading across the Atlantic along with the westerlies, possibly destined to become a quite powerful extratropical storm as it travels towards Iceland and Europe. It is not a threat to the USA.

Anyways: Meet Chantal, currently on a rough latitude parallel with New Jersey:

i-49b058fc3a2042bbbb8eca3bbaaae5d6-Chantal.jpg

But before paying too much attention to Chantal, we could have more to worry about from a tropical wave that the National Hurricane Center is currently calling 99L, located northeast of South America and traveling in the direction of the Windward Islands. If this one develops it could curve up into the Caribbean. I'm sure the forecasters are watching it closely:

i-5d638796eb03eafc15506f84fb45e389-99L.jpg

Meanwhile, Japan is in for more trouble. Typhoon Usagi is now likely a Category 3 storm and expected to further intensify as it heads towards the islands:

i-751f8f575b737960eae737b838a2201e-USAGI July 31.jpg

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Regarding Chantal and the post on the recent Holland/Webster paper...I would say this storm is a very good example of how analysis techniques can infect the continuity of the historical record. Chantal is going to be a minimal 'named storm' for what, all of 12 hours, maybe 24? And well offshore to boot. I would argue that without the benefit of instrumentation we currently employ, this would not be categorized as a tropical storm and would not be included in the count of storms.

->CL

Hi CL,
When I saw Chantal named this morning, the same thought crossed my mind...