TAMPA, Fla. — With the tropics continuing to heat up as the peak of the hurricane season is approaching, some weather terms might be thrown around that are confusing to some people.
When speaking of the tropics and what's brewing out there, the term "invest" might get brought up occasionally when disturbances pop up.
An invest is simply short for "investigative area." It’s also known as an area of interest. It is a designated area of disturbed weather that is being monitored for potential tropical cyclone development.
According to the National Hurricane Center, an invest is "a weather system for which a tropical cyclone forecast center is interested in collecting specialized data sets and/or running model guidance."
Once a system out in the waters gets classified as an invest, weather leaders start to collect data and process it on different government and academic websites – which is where spaghetti and cone models come from.
But once a system starts being called an invest, it doesn't mean that it's likely to develop into a tropical cyclone. There's no correlation between the two.
Invests are numbered from 90 to 99, followed by a suffix letter "L" in the North Atlantic basin, "E" and "C" in the Eastern and Central Pacific basins (respectively), or "W" in the Western Pacific basin.
Numbers are rotated within the season and are re-used as necessary (the next invest after 99 would be numbered 90).
This naming system gives forecasters a way of identifying the individual weather systems and the important information related to them. Also, when there are multiple tropical disturbances, it is easier for meteorologists to communicate what invest they are talking about.
"While the invest classification doesn't guarantee tropical formation, it does give us the necessary tools and resources to better forecast and analyze just how a tropical wave is behaving," 10 Tampa Bay Meteorologist Natalie Ferrari explains.
10 Tampa Bay's previous reporting contributed to this report.