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.

Tropical Storm Leslie is still moving very slow in the central Atlantic with no direct impacts to land. We are now watching an area in the Caribbean for possible development later this week.

A broad area of low pressure is generating disorganized showers and storms. It has a 20% of development over the next 5 days as it moves into the western Caribbean. It it too early to tell if it will affect our area, but we will be monitoring it closely.

October is the time of year where our focus shifts from the Atlantic to the Caribbean sea for tropical development.

Tropical Storm Leslie has changed little over the past several hours. It still has a ragged eye feature with deep convection focused in a curved band wrapped from northeast to southwest of the storm. Slow movement to the southwest continues and it will likely reach hurricane status by tonight or Wednesday. By Thursday, Leslie will turn back to the north over cooler water and into drier air, steady weakening is forecast as it turns east into the weekend.

The main impact to land areas from Leslie continues to be the large swells along the East Coast, Bermuda, Bahamas, Greater and Lesser Antilles. Towards the end of the week, swells will begin to increase near the New England and Atlantic Canadian coastlines.