The GFS is drunk!!!

I fell for the GFS's drunken blunder!

So, last time I posted, I was all excited for the major land-falling hurricane that the GFS was forecasting 5+ days out. I should have known better because:

1) The GFS is drunk

2) The GFS always showed the hurricane forming at the same time, regardless of run time. (No matter what run of the GFS you look at over the past five days, it shows the hurricane forming at the same forecast hour.

3) The Euro model was showing no development at all. 

Finally yesterday, I came to my senses and started to do some research on what is going on. It turns out that the with the GFS's convection characterization, it tends to overestimate large areas of thunderstorms. 

Here is Dr. Masters (a man much smarter that I) in his blog yesterday:

"We know that the GFS model gets in trouble when making predictions of heavy thunderstorm activity via a problem called "convective feedback." Basically, the model sometimes simulates that an unrealistically large area of thunderstorms will develop, destabilize the atmosphere, and cause an area of low pressure to form that will draw in more moisture and create more heavy thunderstorms. This vicious cycle can snowball out of control and generate a bogus low pressure area that can then modify the upper level winds, reduce the wind shear, and allow a tropical depression to form."

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2700

He goes on to say that there is an update to the GFS that will come out later this summer that should fix what I'm going to call a "Bug." He also states that he still gives it a 10% chance that a storm will form in the Carribean late next week. However, I'm not holding my breath!!

First Tropical Depression could also be the first land-falling hurricane of the Season!

6/13/2014 6Z GFS

For the past couple of days, I have been watching as the GFS has put an interesting feature developing South and East of the Yucatan Peninsula. Yesterday's morning's run had the tropical system slamming first into the Yucatan, then Florida, and then out to the middle of the Atlantic Sea. Then, the feature disappeared completely for a couple of runs. However, this morning, the feature re-appeared and the GFS has it tracking much closer to the Eastern coast, potentially affecting Florida, North Carolina, and here in Virginia! 

GFS surface Hour: 312

GFS surface Hour: 348

Discussion

Now, it is of note that this is the GFS fantasy-land and this is two weeks out. Also of note, none of the other models I have looked at have this system (Euro, CMC). But, what makes this at least a little exciting is that it has shown up in a couple of runs now of the GFS (most notably the 6/12 6Z run) with relatively the same track. Also, the GFS is forecasting it to be a tropical storm before 192 (the switchover to fantasy-land)