First Alert Weather In Depth: The tropical season is in full swing

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — It is that time of the year that we start talking more and more about the tropics. Primarily, this is due to storm development and hurricanes becoming more active this time of the year.

We are well into the alphabetical list of names given to storms that reach a certain intensity. This criteria includes a minimum wind speed of 39 mph or greater. It’s important to note that Hilary is not on the list because it was a Pacific Ocean Hurricane.

This Atlantic list includes numerous names already checked-off and used including Emily and Gert. These names may not be memorable to you and that is for a good reason. Even though these storms reached the criteria, they had little or no impact.

However, News10NBC has been tracking Tropical Storm Harold because it had an impact on south Texas over the last 36 hours. Portions of Texas did have quite a bit of flooding. At the current time, there is a lot of active waves located over the Atlantic basin, but there is one in particular storm that we should focus on and that is Franklin.

Right now, Franklin is a minimal tropical storm with winds at 40 mph, but it has made landfall with very heavy torrential rain in the Dominica Republic. Unfortunately, there has been some significant flooding. The general consensus from the computer models are that Franklin is going to move north. Currently, it appears that it will stay away from the mainland of the United States, but that is not a definitive forecast as of yet. It appears that Franklin will come very close to the island of Bermuda in the coming days.

In addition, there appears to be a significant amount of wind shear in this part of the Atlantic. Wind shear is a negative influence for hurricane development.

In general terms, we know we are approaching the peak of the tropical storm season. Statistically the average season reaches a maximum for development in the coming weeks.  So, there’s no surprise that the consensus among the News10 First Alert meteorologists is that we still have a long way to go.