The National Hurricane Center began tracking a system in the Atlantic east of Florida on Sunday, but by Monday afternoon said there was no chance of it forming into a tropical depression ahead of the official start of hurricane season.
In the NHC’s 2 p.m. Monday tropical update, forecasters said the showers and thunderstorms of a broad area of low pressure located a couple of hundred miles northeast of the central Bahamas had decreased over the 24 hours since they first began tracking it.
21 May 8AM EDT: NHC is monitoring a large area of disturbed weather in the southwestern Atlantic. The chance of formation in the next 48 hours is low (🟡10%). For the latest information, please visit https://t.co/tW4KeGe9uJ. pic.twitter.com/WTnE5pxE0H
— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) May 21, 2023
“Environmental conditions have become more hostile and development of this system is not expected while it moves north-northeastward at 5 to 10 mph over the southwestern Atlantic during the next day or so,” forecasters said.
They dropped the chances to 0% to form in the next week.
The tracking forecasts that began last week offer up a longer look ahead for the 2023 hurricane season. The NHC will project chances for systems up to seven days before formation, an increase of two days over previous seasons.
Hurricane season officially runs from June 1-Nov. 30, although many recent years have seen storms form before that official start.
Technically, the NHC said 2023 has already seen its first tracked system, although it wasn’t named. In an update this month, the NHC stated an area of low pressure that formed off the northeastern coast of the U.S. in mid-January was in fact a subtropical storm.
Its retroactive designation means that the next tracked system could end up being named Tropical Depression Two by the NHC, although often storms churn up fast enough for them to skip right over the depression phase and go right into being named a tropical storm.
The first named system of the year would be Tropical Storm Arlene.
