JULY '22 REVIEW


July gets started where June left off with 3 marks on the map. A tropical wave with a 10% chance of formation east of the Lesser Antilles, Invest 95L in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, and Potential Tropical Cyclone #2 in the SW Caribbean.

We'll start with the tropical wave that entered the eastern Caribbean then fizzled out. Or to be more technical, conditions were not favorable for development and nothing becomes of it.

Next was Invest 95L. This system had a mesoscale vortex form near Galveston, TX that literally moved most of the rain out of the Houston area. The Golden Triangle area ended up getting the bulk of the rain from this system, leaving much of the rain starved central Texas coast pretty much high and dry. 


The final holdover from June was PTC2. On July 1st, this system had been designated a PTC for a record 6 days. The NHC only started referring to these systems as a PTC since 2017. Incidentally, the record PTC2 broke was that of PTC1 last month. So finally after 6 days, this system gets enough of it's act together to become Tropical Storm Bonnie the morning of the 1st. 2nd named storm of the season. Bonnie struggles in the SW Caribbean, and late that same day, makes landfall right near the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border. Bonnie would cross Central America, maintaining tropical storm strength, and enter on the Pacific side where it would retain the name Bonnie. First same name crossover since Otto in 2016. Bonnie strengthens into a cat 2 hurricane as it parallels about 200 miles off the coast of Mexico and finally dies out almost entering the Central Pacific basin.


The first day of July remains busy as a new AOI pops up off the coast of Georgia. On the morning of the 2nd it became Tropical Storm Colin. This system was actually upgraded to a tropical storm while over land in South Carolina. Colin was short lived as it hugged the Carolina coasts before it merged with a cold front and was swept away.

On the morning of Sunday, July 10, an AOI popped up on the map for a system expected to affect the upper Gulf coast. This was a decaying frontal boundary moving off the coast into the Gulf. Though the system did produce rain along the immediate coast from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle, it never materialized into anything. It never even got tagged as an Invest. The highest probability it had of forming was 30%, and that was only for about a day before those probabilities starting shrinking.

By the afternoon of July 13th, nothing was on the map, and it stayed that way for the entire rest of the month. So July does produce 2 tropical storms, but neither lasted more than 48 hours and both either dissipated or were out of the basin by the 3rd.

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