ORLANDO, Fla. – The invest designation is a critical step in tropical weather forecast. Invest stands for area of investigation and is the point when specialized hurricane models are run on the disturbance.
Hurricane Hunter missions are also assigned if the disturbance is close enough to land.
You may be wondering what happens once an invest number gets to 99.
Invests do not climb past 99, instead they go back to the starting point of 90. So, if another disturbance forms and the NHC designates it, it would be Invest 90L.
Each season starts fresh with Invest 90 and cycles through 99 until the year is over. So it’s possible, and more often than not likely to have multiple invests of the same number for a given season.
L by the way designates the basin the disturbance is located in, which in our case is the Atlantic basin.