A touch of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is playing out in real time off the Southeast coast this summer as a persistent weather pattern brews “double, double, toil and (tropical) trouble.”
So far, the region has churned up two tropical storms, two potential tropical disturbances, and it's now being watched closely for the development of yet another system.
On Aug. 5, the National Hurricane Center put the chances of a fifth tropical disturbance emerging in the region at roughly 40% over the next seven days. It’s one of two potential systems the center is watching, in addition to Tropical Storm Dexter, which spun up off a frontal boundary off the Southeast coast on Aug. 3.
This hurricane season isn’t the first time the region has merited close attention from the National Hurricane Center, said Dan Brown, branch chief of the center's hurricane specialists. "It’s an area that we watch for development, especially during the early part of hurricane season, in late May, June and July.”
“We often get frontal boundaries that move off the coast there and then kind of stall there,” Brown told USA TODAY. In 2023, Ophelia formed in the region in September, and in 2022, Colin formed just off the coast of South Carolina, he said. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen multiple systems form there.”
