Update (Wednesday, July 22, 3:30 p.m. EDT):
Tropical Storm Bertha has officially made landfall near the Biloxi Wildlife Management Area in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, around 2 p.m. CDT, as announced in a special statement put out by the NHC. Bertha is about 40 miles east of New Orleans and continues to move west-northwest at 7 mph (11 km/h). Gusty winds are expected to increase along the warned areas.
Original article, posted on Wednesday, July 22:
Tropical Storm Bertha is approaching the southeastern coast of Louisiana as it moves slowly west-northwest. The 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, July 22, advisory indicated that Bertha holds maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75 km/h).
Tropical Storm Warnings are in effect for the metropolitan New Orleans area and the Lake Pontchartrain region. You can expect tropical storm conditions, meaning winds that could exceed 39 mph, to remain in place at least through the overnight hours Wednesday into Thursday. It is likely that the Tropical Storm Watches that are in effect across the central and western coast of Louisiana will be upgraded to Tropical Storm Warnings during the next advisories.
Keep in mind that Bertha, although it’s expected to increase its forward speed a little, will continue to move slower than average, at under 10 mph, through the next two days. This will be an all-week event as the system continues to brush the Louisiana coast throughout Wednesday and into early Thursday.
Hurricane Hunters indicated that Bertha’s center of circulation could be weakening, and it is possible that a new center of circulation could form closer to the cluster of thunderstorms that has been shifted mainly over water. So as Bertha continues to move slowly west and its center emerges over water, it will likely remain a tropical storm and not completely dissipate. However, it will be battered by wind shear, which means that Bertha is not likely to intensify before arriving in Texas near Galveston, likely on Thursday afternoon.
Once Bertha makes landfall, it will be the second storm this season to form and to make landfall in the Gulf Coast. Arthur made landfall on June 17 in southern Louisiana, bringing torrential rains that may have set a new all-time 24-hour precipitation record for the state: 29.06 inches (738 millimeters) near Cottonport, Louisiana. According to Gallagher Re, Arthur is responsible for at least $1 billion in damage and four deaths.
An unusual storm
Bertha has demonstrated that it’s not a typical tropical storm. With a strong high-pressure system to the north and very strong wind shear coming in from the north-northeast, much of the convection, which runs in the troposphere between 6,500 and 16,000 feet (2,000 and 5,000 meters) high, has been shifted over the open waters of the Gulf. Yes, there have been some rain showers and thunderstorms pushing across Florida and the Southeast, but these have been intermittent.
The biggest issue with Bertha has been the gusty winds that have brought very rough surf conditions and storm surge along the immediate coast. Panama City Beach recorded a sustained wind of 42 mph on Tuesday, and gusts above 50 mph were recorded along the Panhandle Coast. Storm surge will likely produce flooding along the immediate Gulf Coast east of the storm center; up to three feet of storm surge is possible, especially when the winds and location coincide with high tide.
The latest satellite image shows some breaks in the clouds across the Florida Panhandle, with the deepest convection moving slightly ahead of the system but still to the southwest of the center and over the Gulf. The winds are coming in directly from the south across the western portion of Florida through the Mississippi and Alabama border as the system’s center crosses southeastern Louisiana.
Central Texas Coast will likely be most impacted by Bertha’s rain
The heaviest cluster of thunderstorms associated with Bertha, which has been shifted well south of the center of the storm, will likely impact the central coast of Texas, extending from areas just south of Galveston County through the Corpus Christi area on Thursday afternoon and evening. Expect rainfall along the immediate central coast of Texas to range between two and four inches, while the greater Houston area will likely receive less than an inch of rain.
As far as the winds, they will remain around tropical storm strength across the central and western coast of Louisiana through Thursday afternoon. As the system moves closer to southeast Texas, the winds will start to diminish across Louisiana and likely pick up across the Galveston Bay area later Thursday afternoon as the system’s center approaches. The system will quickly dissipate as it moves over the Lone Star State.
It is quite rare for the first two named storms of the season to make a U.S. landfall. The last time this occurred was also during a strong El Niño year, 2015:
· Tropical Storm Ana (May 10): Made landfall near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, becoming the earliest U.S. tropical cyclone landfall on record at the time.
· Tropical Storm Bill (June 16): Made landfall along the Texas coast near Port O’Connor.
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has averaged just over three landfalls by named storms per year, with two of those landfalls being from hurricanes.
Has Bertha brought dangerous heat to the South?
Over 55 million people are under some sort of heat advisory across the U.S., but the highest concentration is over the South Central and Deep South. Bertha has ignited some interesting contrasts in warnings along the Gulf Coast on Wednesday. As our colleague Michael Lowry highlighted on his Substack Wednesday morning, it is very unusual to see heat advisories and extreme heat warnings in effect over the same areas that are being impacted by a tropical storm and are also under tropical storm warnings. This clearly shows how different Bertha has been from a typical tropical storm.
We have seen this mixture of warnings because strong wind shear has kept the deepest convection well away from the center and to the south. In most other situations, a tropical storm would bring a broader, deeper layer of clouds, which would keep temperatures below the threshold needed to trigger heat alerts. But with Bertha, the strong wind shear shifting that thick cloud layer away from land has allowed temperatures to soar. Heat index values could rise as high as 115°F through 7 p.m. CDT Wednesday across many areas of the Deep South. The heat alerts extend widely across the Deep South and westward over more than half of eastern Texas, reaching as far north as southern Oklahoma. A frontal boundary extends from the Appalachians through Arkansas and into southern Oklahoma, keeping all of the heat bottled up from Mississippi westward through much of Texas.
Read: The emerging danger of post-hurricane heat waves
Is there anything else brewing in the Atlantic basin?
Aside from Tropical Storm Bertha, the National Hurricane Center does not have anything else highlighted across the Atlantic basin for the next seven days.
The latest satellite imagery shows two tropical waves emerging from Africa, one ahead of the Cabo Verde Islands and another deeper cluster of thunderstorms just southeast of the Cabo Verde Islands. However, these systems are not likely to develop within the next seven days. The rest of the central and western Atlantic continues to be dominated by Saharan dust, which will bring hazy skies across Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and eastern Cuba over the weekend.
Eastern Pacific stays active, but no immediate threats to land
Of the two named storms in the Atlantic plus six in the Eastern Pacific this season, just one has made it to hurricane strength thus far: Hurricane Fausto, which is currently churning through the remote Northeast Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii after reaching Category 1 strength on Monday evening, July 20. That’s a full three weeks later than the average arrival date of the first Eastern Pacific hurricane, even though the region is running several weeks ahead of schedule on named storms.
As of 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Fausto was centered about 850 miles west-southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, moving west-northwest at 7 mph (11 km/h) with top sustained winds of 80 mph (130 km/h). Fausto’s pulsing central core of showers and thunderstorms (convection) was accompanied by a broader shield of convection extending well to the east. Wind shear is moderate (10 knots), and sea surface temperatures along Fausto’s path are just 1 degree Celsius above the typical hurricane-sustaining threshold of 26°C (79°F), so Fausto appears likely to maintain its strength over several days and could intensify slightly at times. However, NHC was not predicting Fausto to reach Category 2 before it encounters gradually cooler waters and a steadily drier atmosphere. The latter will bring midlevel relative humidity down from about 75% on Wednesday to around 50% by the coming weekend.
The model consensus is for Fausto to pass just north of the Hawaiian Islands early next week as a weakening tropical storm, though some models – including some members of the Google DeepMind ensemble, the top performer on Atlantic tropical cyclone tracks in 2025 – suggest Fausto or its remnants could pass directly over the islands.
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson contributed to this post.
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