TROPICAL STORM CLAUDETTE… After many hours of terribly confusing nomenclature (aka Potential Tropical Cyclone #3), the National Hurricane Center has finally made the transition to calling this system Tropical Storm Claudette.
The rationale for the upgrade, despite the center of the storm already being onshore in southeastern Louisiana, is that the system has a “well enough” defined low-level center and now closely resembles a strongly sheared tropical storm.