Hurricane Outlook: Gulf Storm Aims at Upper Texas, Dolly's Remnants Fizzle

The National Hurricane Center's Monday morning tropical outlook has two systems on the board, and neither is the kind of storm East Coast surfers spend September waiting for. One is a scrappy, close-in low about to come ashore on the Gulf coast; the other is the leftovers of Tropical Storm Dolly, racing west past Hispaniola with nothing organized left to give.

The Gulf system — tagged Invest AL97 — sits a little more than 100 miles south of the southern Louisiana coast, producing a small but concentrated cluster of showers and thunderstorms that is showing some signs of organization. The NHC gives it a high, 70 percent chance of becoming at least a tropical depression, and expects a short-lived depression or tropical storm to form before it reaches the Upper Texas or southwestern Louisiana coast on Tuesday. Tropical storm watches or warnings could go up for parts of that coastline later today, and an Air Force Reserve reconnaissance aircraft was scheduled to investigate the system this morning.

For surf, keep expectations honest. This is a weak, fast-developing low sitting almost on top of the coast, which means almost no fetch and almost no time to build a proper swell. What the Upper Texas coast and southwestern Louisiana get instead is short-period wind swell arriving with the system: waist- to chest-high and disorganized at spots like Galveston, Surfside Beach and Holly Beach, with the best of it on the leading edge before the wind swings fully onshore. If you paddle out, the hazards are the real story — strong longshore current and rip currents, a lot of water moving through the bars, lightning with the squalls, and heavy rainfall runoff fouling the water for days afterward. Locally heavy rain is expected along the Upper Texas and southwestern Louisiana coasts through midweek regardless of whether the low is named.

Farther east, the remnants of Dolly are now just a surface trough of low pressure, spreading disorganized showers and storms from near Hispaniola east to the northern Leeward Islands. It is moving west-northwest at 20 to 25 mph — too fast to consolidate — and running into generally unfavorable upper-level winds, so the NHC puts redevelopment near zero percent over the next 48 hours and only 10 percent through seven days. Translation for the islands: no swell worth chasing, but locally heavy rain and gusty winds are likely across the Leewards, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and the Bahamas over the next couple of days.

That 10 percent tail is the one worth keeping an eye on. If the trough finds better air near the Bahamas late in the week, it would be positioned where a system finally starts to matter for Florida and the Southeast. As it stands, nothing here sends groundswell up the seaboard — the East Coast's best waves come from strong, well-organized storms tracking well offshore, where hundreds of miles of open water can turn wind into clean long-period lines. A depression already scraping the coast cannot do that.

Zoom out and this fits the season we forecast back in June: a strong El Niño has kept vertical wind shear high across the tropical Atlantic, favoring weak, short-lived systems over long-tracking Cape Verde hurricanes. Climatological peak is still ahead on September 10, so the window is open — it just has not produced a real swell-maker yet.

Check the region and spot forecasts below for the hour-by-hour detail on the Gulf coast this week, and watch this space if either system changes its mind.