The tropics are beginning to wake up as we head into the early portions of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season as the second storm has been named which is Bertha! The storm reached Tropical Storm status yesterday evening as it'd developed slowly off the Gulf Coast states. As of now the system is quite disorganized and is not expected to gain much strength.
Through the week this tropical system will slowly meander westward across the Gulf Coast States bringing heavy rainfall to coastal locations in those states. The good news is that this system is not expected to gain much strength thanks to slightly cooler sea surface temperatures along with some upper-level shear that will slightly tear apart this system over the next few days.
Even without much intensification expected, Tropical Storm Warning's and Watches are in place across portions of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. As noted previously impacts thankfully will stay on the lighter side however near the coastline in states impacted wind gusts may reach up to 50 mph while storm surge along the coast will only rise to 1 to 3 feet. The biggest impact from this system actually looks to be rainfall especially for coastal cities, some areas locally may see 1-2" of rain.
This system is right on track when it comes to the timing of our second named year of the season. We expect our second system to be named by July 17th so we are only a few days behind that, but sometimes we can see systems like Beryl back in 2024. Looking back, not only was that a strong system but considering how early in the year it formed it truly was an anomalous storm.
Now we're only starting the Atlantic Hurricane Season and although not much can be predicted this far out, it's good to see that the season isn't running out the gate to start! We are still right near average with our named storms by this time of year and although many of these names will be used, hopefully we won't be mentioning the word "major" when describing them later this year.
