Good evening everyone…unless you’re 91L.

As the day went on today 91L looked worse and worse, and a surprise came by early afternoon when 91L divided…in half!  This is the first time that I can remember that cyclomitosis occurring. I name it that because I am not familiar with a different term, and it looked like a cell division in biology.

The cyclomitosis that occurred today was caused by the separation of the tropical wave spawning some of the convection, and the actual low that was 91L.  At one point they were 200-300 miles apart, only loosely sharing clouds and wind flow similar to what spindles look like during cell division.  Satellite over the last few hours has shown some slow consolidation in cloud cover and a considerable spin in the eastern area of convection is noted.   Unfortunately recon had communication problems and we did not get the data we needed to get an idea of what is happening out there. The buoys and the scatterometer passes also were not much help.   Looks like we will have to wait until morning to get an exact picture of what is going on.  Until then, the models are close to useless except at the upper levels of the atmosphere.   91L will only gain latitude with strength.  Until then it will continue to move on a west to WNW path into the Caribbean.  As we saw with Don, the eastern Caribbean has a reputation of killing storms. Also, 91L is a very large system.  For these reasons I believe development will be slow, and much slower than the models are showing right now.

I think that cyclogenesis could come sometime tomorrow, but I only give that a 70% chance. Below I have posted the current satellite image, which will update on its own.  If you click the image it will take you to a loop of infrared satellite images over the last few hours. The brighter reds are colder cloud tops, and thus stronger thunderstorms.