By David Schutz | [email protected] | South Florida Sun Sentinel
The first Atlantic hurricane of the season may be brewing in storm clouds rolling off the coast of Africa as they begin an ominous march across the ocean toward the Caribbean.
Will it be a threat to the U.S.? It's too soon to know, forecasters say, but odds of the system developing are now very high, and it bears watching over the next week.
As of 8 a.m. Sunday, its odds of developing into a tropical system in the next seven days spiked to an 80% chance. And it now has a 30% chance in the next two days, up from 10% just hours earlier.
The trend from there shows movement to the west with many forecast models predicting the system reaching hurricane strength north of Puerto Rico late next week or into next weekend, according to Bryan Norcross, Fox Weather's hurricane specialist.
"The consensus of the various long-range computer forecast models is that the weather pattern over Florida, the Gulf, and the Southeast will be generally supportive of the system developing into a hurricane," Norcross wrote on his blog, Hurricane Intel.
Norcross warns that the system hasn't even formed yet, and that it's far too early to predict any potential impacts to land.
The biggest uncertainty lies in a weather front forecast to move off the U.S. East Coast, potentially steering the tropical system into a turn to the northwest and eventually north. When and where that turn happens would determine how much of a threat the storm becomes.
That turn is shown in the so-called "spaghetti models," which map the long-range storm tracks forecast by the many various computer models.
But "all long-range forecasts for a system that has not even begun to develop are subject to large errors and are likely to change many times," Norcross said.
The next named storm would be Erin.
On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an August update to its 2025 hurricane season outlook, slightly lowering its prediction for how many storms to expect but still calling for an above-average season.
"History tells us that activity picks up in the middle of August, so it would be unusual if that didn't happen," Norcross said. "The overall atmospheric pattern looks like it will be generally conducive to storm development for the next couple of weeks."
A second system currently meandering over the central Atlantic, as of 8 a.m. Sunday, has only a 20% chance of developing into a tropical system over the next week, according to the National Hurricane Center.
That system is expected to move northwest or north and doesn't pose a threat to land, forecasters said.