Colorado State University forecasters announced last Thursday that the hurricane season would be "extremely active." In fact, the forecast includes the most hurricanes ever announced in an April bulletin from the University of Colorado since the team began issuing forecasts in 1995.
“We have a very concerning forecast with 23 named storms, 11 hurricanes and 5 major hurricanes,” said Klotzbach, a senior scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University. “And even that flies in the face of everything the models predict.” Everything suggests that the season will be extremely active: water temperatures in the Atlantic will once again reach heat records and the transition to La Niña will occur quite quickly,” he said.
A normal year has an average of 14 tropical storms, of which seven become hurricanes, according to weather records taken between 1991 and 2020.
These forecasts are for storms that form in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
Warm waters fuel hurricanes and help make the atmosphere more unstable. La Niña – a phase of a cyclical pattern of water temperatures and winds along the equator in the Pacific Ocean – can affect weather patterns around the world.
Klotzbach expects La Niña conditions to develop over the next two months. In a classic climate pattern, La Niña brings greater activity to the Atlantic region because lighter winds in the upper atmosphere allow hurricanes to accumulate the large, powerful clouds that give them momentum, while 'El Niño causes the winds over the Atlantic to drop, which goes against these high clouds.
But lately, the situation over the Atlantic Ocean has been far from usual. Despite El Niño last year, the Atlantic produced seven hurricanes, the average for a normal season.
Record heat in the Atlantic Ocean
For more than a year, ocean temperatures across much of the Atlantic have been breaking records, without scientists being able to fully explain the reasons.
“It is obvious that a lot of things can still change,” said Mr. Klotzbach, “but not that much. Even if the Atlantic warms less between February and September than it did during the same period over the past 40 years, we would be the second warmest region on record since 1980.”
It remains to be seen how the forecasts will be adjusted as the season approaches which will begin on June 1, 2024. For the moment, it is not brilliant… _AF
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