Image by: NOAA/NASA GOES Project

By Rob Gutro, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Last week’s low pressure system in the eastern Pacific Ocean that was about 1,000 miles southwest of the Baja California fizzled out. This week, there’s a new low pressure area in the eastern Pacific that forecasters are watching and it is closer to the western Mexican coast.

This low pressure area was located several hundred miles south of Manzanillo, Mexico on June 16 at 8 a.m. EDT. Although the showers and thunderstorms associated with the low pressure area are disorganized, the National Hurricane Center, Miami, Fla. says that “some development of this system is possible as it moves slowly west-northwestward over the next day or two.”

The chances that it may organize further and become a tropical depression in the next 2 days are between a 30 and 50 percent, according to the Hurricane Center.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-12) captured this satellite image of the low on June 13 at 10:45 a.m. EDT (14:45 UTC). The low is the circular area of clouds in the center of the image. Mexico and Central America are the landforms to the right of the system.

GOES is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was created by NASA’s GOES Project, located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.