Meteorologists are watching the Caribbean for signs of potential tropical development in mid- to late May.
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00:00We're going to take you into the mountains of Puerto Rico and here we are in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where we've had some recent flash flooding, at least in the central part of the island here up into the mountains.
00:11And while there wasn't a whole lot going on earlier in the day, some of these persistent downpours have just been dumping a few inches of rain this afternoon right over the central part of Puerto Rico.
00:23That's a short-term issue here.
00:24We're going to look a little farther down the line later into the month of May.
00:28We'll be watching areas around Panama and Costa Rica, parts of northern South America, and early season development or sometimes preseason development before the official start of the hurricane season on June 1st.
00:39We sometimes look to this area here for what we call a gyre, which is a large mass of disorganized thunderstorms that begin to gradually kind of circulate around a fixed point in a counterclockwise fashion.
00:53So here's our forecast for mid-May, and this features a lot more rain than what we're seeing right now.
00:59We're expecting to see a big increase in thunderstorms from the Caymans to Cuba to Jamaica, down into Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, and other areas as well, and into Costa Rica as well.
01:09Now, here you can see this broad circulation is a sign of how we're trying to represent this gyre concept, and sometimes within that, if the conditions are favorable for development or unfavorable for humanity here,
01:23we root against storms, a smaller zone of low pressure can begin to spin up, and sometimes these can pull north or move west.
01:30It's a little unlikely that we'd see this impact in the United States if we do indeed see any development, but at this point, we're looking way down the line here from mid-May until the beginning of the final week of May,
01:41maybe on May 15th or 18th to the 22nd, there's a low chance of development.
01:45Could be on the Pacific side, could be on the Atlantic side.
01:48We'll keep an eye on this area here over the next week or two.