This year’s Atlantic hurricane season should be “near normal,” government forecasters announced on Thursday, with the likelihood of nine to 15 named storms, and two to four major Category 3 hurricanes with winds of 111 miles per hour or greater.
Hurricane season officially begins on June 1 and runs through Nov. 30, with the peak coming in August, September and October. This week, a subtropical storm, Andrea, weak and short-lived, slipped in — the fifth year in a row that a storm gained enough strength to warrant a name before the season’s start. (Storms generally get named when they reach wind speeds of 39 miles per hour.)
Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University, said that “this is the first time on record that the Atlantic has had five consecutive years with named storms” before the official start of the season; the previous record of four years in a row occurred from 1951 through 1954, he said. But he added, “I don’t think that there is too much that we can make of this at this point.”
The window for hurricane season is not set in stone, and has been shifted by government forecasters over time, said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Still, he said, “we’re creeping out a little bit more, it seems,” and added, “I don’t think that’s an accident.”
Two main factors shaped this year’s forecast. One is the presence of a weak El Niño pattern in the Pacific, which tends to increase wind shear and suppress storm formation; some researchers, including Dr. Klotzbach, had suggested that this would cause the season to have somewhat fewer storms than normal. But there are also predictions of conditions that favor more storm activity, which include warmer-than-average temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, said Neil Jacobs, acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The problem with announcements that try to forecast storm activity, some climate scientists say, is that they tell people what the government can best predict, but don’t give them the information they need most: Will damaging storms hit the coast? “It doesn’t say anything about how many are going to make landfall,” said Suzana J. Camargo, a research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and executive director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia University. Read more:
