The Atlantic has been calm recently, but there are three named storms in the Pacific right now, all with paths close to Hawaii.
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00:00We enjoyed a nice recent break from tropical activity in the Atlantic.
00:03But as AccuWeather's lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva explains,
00:09activity is about to ramp back up.
00:13Yeah, I think we're going to be seeing big changes in the Atlantic coming at the end of
00:16August. Starting probably around August 27th, I think one of the big factors that's been kind of
00:22inhibiting tropical development, at least for most of the month of August, is going to start to go
00:26away. And that is the African dust. That's the hair and dry air that's been coming across the
00:31Atlantic and kind of choking off these tropical waves. Thinking by the end of August, I think a
00:36lot of that dust will start to wane. And so as we approach the peak of the hurricane season,
00:42which is September 10th, we're going to start to see a lot more of these robust waves coming off
00:46of the coast of Africa. And without that dry air, or at least less of it, I think they're going to
00:51have a better shot of developing.
00:55All right. Well, the Atlantic has been quiet. The Pacific has been active. Hode brought heavy
01:01flooding, rain, and gusty winds to Hawaii. Some of that flooding was pretty nasty out there.
01:07We've been dealing with, again, a lot of concerns about flooding there, especially for the Big
01:12Island earlier this weekend. The rain has been exiting, has been pulling away to the west here,
01:19thankfully. So we're getting a bit of a break there. We have a radar view, and some of this
01:23is supplemented by satellite data for the area around the west side of Hawaii. And you can see,
01:27again, where the heaviest rain and the flooding had been, it was mainly over the Big Island. We
01:31had some rain off to the north. But overall, rain tied to Hone is exiting, and we're in better
01:37shape there, at least in the short term. But we want to jump to the Atlantic here, because a lot
01:42of us are very interested in how the next month is going to progress, especially with the southeast
01:49coast, the Carolina coast, Texas coast in mind here, and in between, Louisiana as well. We've
01:54had five named storms so far, and we're right around average, really. We typically would see
01:59our fifth named storm form on August 22nd. That was four days ago. So we're not ahead or behind
02:05of the average for the number of storms that we've seen. We did see a lot of energy with Debbie.
02:12Debbie was an unusually strong storm for a long period of time this early in the season. Typically,
02:17our third hurricane forms, at least the average statistic lands on September 7th, and the first
02:23major hurricane would land on September 1st. We've already had three hurricanes and one major
02:28hurricane, so we're marginally ahead of average there for those metrics. We're going to keep our
02:32eye out for a series of tropical waves, which are kind of drawing the troughs here on the map
02:36across the eastern Atlantic. Things are getting more active. We have a lot of dry air, though,
02:40a lot of dry air in the short term, and even arguably into places off to the west near the
02:45Turks and Caicos. So we're not expecting anything too soon in the Atlantic, but we will be looking
02:50for one of those tropical waves to enter this area here this coming weekend, Saturday, Sunday,
02:56Monday, a week from now. We have a low chance, again, a low chance of development here off to
03:01the east of the Caribbean. So again, that's the next thing that we'll be watching in the Atlantic
03:06Basin. But as we do take you back into the Pacific, just because, again, this has been an area where
03:10there's been more activity, even though it's a little bit lower impact moving away from Hawaii,
03:14Hone is moving away, and that's not going to bring any additional significant impacts,
03:18although there are still some big waves that we've inherited from the past few days from that near
03:22miss, or at least you could call it a direct hit, at least even though we didn't see landfall,
03:26because the rain really intensified. And look at that waterfall in Hilo. Elsewhere to the east of
03:31Hawaii, here is Gilma. Gilma is a hurricane, and this is going to continue to move west. Gilma is
03:36a Category 2 hurricane now, but look at this. We're going to go back down to a tropical storm by 8 a.m.
03:40Wednesday. Tropical depression as it passes actually north of Hawaii this weekend. Remember,
03:46Hone passed to the south, but overall, Gilma is going to be passing to the north as a weaker storm.
03:52And beyond that, we have Hector on the map too, so a lot of action. Hector is a tropical storm
03:57and will remain a tropical storm. This will take a path kind of halfway between where Hone and
04:02Gilma will be moving, but also similar to Gilma, we're looking at this weakening to a tropical
04:07depression and tropical rainstorm losing its wind energy before it makes that close push into Hawaii.