Hurricane Safety and Preparedness

What An Invest Means In Hurricane Season

At a Glance

Invests are usually areas of low pressure that catch the interest of the National Hurricane Center.
Special computer models are run when a system is tagged as an invest.
Sometimes these systems become depressions or storms.

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You may hear the term "invest" used during hurricane season. While it doesn't mean a system has become a tropical depression or storm, it does have significant meaning among meteorologists.

An invest – short for "investigation" – is a naming convention used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) to identify features they are monitoring for potential future development into a tropical depression or storm.

These invests will usually be festering clusters of showers and thunderstorms that do not yet have a persistent low-level circulation.

Here's what the nomenclature means: The term "invest" is followed by the numbers 90 through 99 and either the letter "L" for the Atlantic Basin systems or "E" for the Eastern Pacific systems. These full labels in the Atlantic would be Invest 90L, Invest 91L, etc.

Once the end of the list is reached with either Invest 99L in the Atlantic or Invest 99E in the Eastern Pacific, it starts back over again with Invest 90L or Invest 90E.

Here's what that signifies: According to the NHC, by designating a tropical weather system as an invest, the collection of specialized data sets and computer models on the area of interest can begin.

That includes the scheduling of Hurricane Hunter aircraft missions and the running of hurricane models, including the well-known spaghetti model tracks.

However, just because a system has been called an invest doesn't guarantee development into a tropical depression or storm.

Invests do not count in the season's statistics like storms and hurricanes.