Even though we’re on the downswing, October can still be a very active month in the tropics. Typically we start to see less in the way of tropical waves rolling off the coast of Africa, and more in the way of ‘home grown’ development coming out of the Caribbean. Along those lines, we are going to be watching an area of disturbed weather across the western Caribbean over the next several days.

It’s a messy setup for now, but there should be a broad area of low pressure that drifts north toward the Yucatan Peninsula through this weekend, and potentially helps set up a plume of moisture and heavy rain up through the western Gulf Coast and central U.S. next week. At some point next week, it’s a possible that a secondary area of low pressure may form further east near Cuba and head north either into the eastern Gulf or far west Atlantic. This is many days away, and at this point is just one of those setups where we watch and see how things evolve.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Leslie continues to churn and slowly strengthen in the middle of the Atlantic about 500 miles east of Bermuda. It will slowly head north over the next few days and eventually make a turn to the east this weekend. As it moves over cooler waters the next couple of days, it will slowly start to weaken and lose tropical characteristics.