HOUSTON — According to the National Weather Service, a tropical storm in the southwest Gulf of Mexico will bring significant rainfall to parts of Texas and Louisiana this week. The storm is expected to develop into a tropical storm and possibly a hurricane.
The weather service said the system will slowly drift northwest over the next few days, moving along the Gulf coasts of Mexico and Texas, the agency said Sunday.
“A tropical storm is expected to develop over the next day or so,” the weather service said Sunday afternoon.
Donald Jones, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, Louisiana, said during a weather briefing Saturday night that parts of southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana can expect “a lot” of rain in the middle and later part of this week.
“I definitely want to keep a close eye on the forecasts here over the next few days because this is something that can develop and evolve quite quickly. We’re looking at everything from an unnamed, tropical, moist air mass all the way up to the potential for a hurricane,” Jones said.
According to Jones, the warm water temperatures and other conditions in the Gulf of Mexico are favorable for storm development.
“We’ve seen it before, where we have these rapidly developing hurricanes in just a few days or even less. So that’s not out of the question here,” Jones said.
A U.S. Air Force Reserve hurricane hunter was expected to survey the tropical disturbance later Sunday and collect more data.
The tropical disturbance comes after an unusually quiet August and early September in the current Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through Nov. 30. The season is expected to peak on Tuesday, Jones said.
So far this hurricane season, there have been five named storms, including Hurricane Beryl, which left nearly 3 million homes and businesses in Texas without power in July, mostly in the Houston area. Experts had predicted one of the busiest hurricane seasons in the Atlantic Ocean recorded.
In a report released last weekResearchers from Colorado State University cited several reasons for the decline in hurricane activity during the current hurricane season, including extremely high upper-level temperatures that stabilize the atmosphere and too much easterly wind shear in the eastern Atlantic Ocean.
“However, we still expect an above-average season as conditions appear to become more favourable on a large scale around mid-September,” the report said.
Last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has updated its outlook but still predicted a very active Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasters adjusted the number of expected named storms from 17 to 25 to 17 to 24.