Wow… I have not been at work for a looooong time. I just spent 12 days in Tennessee. Week one was all business –  I was at the AMS Broadcast Conference. It just happened to be held in Nashville, the city of my birth. The next week I was on vacation. I also spent that week in Tennessee at my Mom’s house. It’s the most time I’ve spent in Tennessee since December 1985.

I will use this blog to discuss my impressions from the AMS conference,  AND my thoughts of my former home town, at a later date. For now, I want to get back to work.

The tropics are about to come alive! We jump started this tropical season with not one, but two (count ’em , two) early season storms. We are tracking a new wave in the Atlantic that looks like it has a pretty good shot at becoming storm number 3. It would be name T.S. Chantal if it can get its act together.

This is what it looked like Sunday:

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/floaters/95L/flash-vis-short.html

The latest model runs all seem to want to make it grow into a weak tropical storm by Tuesday or Wednesday. Most of them are keeping it well east of Florida.

storm_95

The GFS has it south of Puerto Rico by Wednesday… the Canadian has it as a much bigger system heading to Charleston by next weekend.  The bottom line here is we will spend this week watching this wave grow day by day and checking on it from model run to model run.

In the mean time the drier air was a gift over the weekend. The race at Daytona was excellent Saturday night, and Sunday turned out to be a great day all over Central Florida. The Rip Current risk is still the big issue on the coast. The surf was really rough this weekend. As we head into a new work week it will take a couple of days for the regular afternoon storms to get going again. By mid-week the rain chances should be back to about 30%.

I’ll wrap this up for now… and post an update on the topics during the day on Monday.

And I will return to air waves on Local 6 News Monday afternoon at 5 p.m.

See you then!