Even though we are nearing the end of hurricane season, we are still closely monitoring the tropics. One tropical wave has managed to hold together and even become better organized over the past couple of days, despite strong wind shear. It is now 200 miles east of the Leeward Islands and is producing a large area of showers and storms in the western tropical Atlantic.

It has been battling wind shear but conditions for development are expected to improve as it moves west northwest. We will likely see this system become a Tropical Depression or Tropical Storm Patty over the next day or so.

Models are taking the system near or just north of the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and the southeastern Bahamas. These areas should closely monitor the development of this system. You will notice the models turn the system to the east northeast before it nears the East coast. That is due to a trough coming off the coast, which will steer it away from the United States.

The end of hurricane season is quickly approaching, but it looks like we’ll probably end up adding one more named storm to the tally for the 2018 season.

On Sunday evening, a large area of showers and storms was centered a few hundred miles east of the Lesser Antilles. This disturbance has been battling strong upper-level winds for the past couple days, but it’ll be moving northwestward into a better environment this week and the National Hurricane Center has a 70% of development over the next 5 days. Should a tropical storm form, it would get the name ‘Patty’.

There is potential for some minimal impacts across the northern Caribbean and Bahamas later in the week, but this time of year it’s pretty tough for a storm to reach the U.S. Storm or not, there is quite a bit of model agreement at this point that this will ultimately get picked up by our next East Coast trough, and ushered out to sea. For now, it’s something we’ll watch, but there isn’t much to be concerned about. We’ll keep you updated through the week.