Satellite view of Tropical Storm Josephine about 1900 miles off the US coast, on August 14, 2020.
Atlantic hurricane registers date back to 1851, and in all that time the ocean has never piled up so many storms in such a short span as this year.
So far, 11 storms have formed since May. This is now the earliest date on record for a storm with a “K” name, after meteorologists identified Tropical Storm Kyle on Friday. Five have hit the US, and the current pace peaks in 2005 when a record 28 storms, including Hurricane Katrina, broke out of the Atlantic Ocean. While storms of 2020 have been weak, the lack of volatility will not come as a relief to anyone in New York like the Northeast Polder that holds the power for the better part of a week after Hurricane Isaias.
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Storm season in the Atlantic Ocean has not really started yet. On paper, the annual risk of hurricanes runs from June 1 to November 30, but observers with long periods of time know that things won’t get really heavy until the end of August. Bill Gray, the late Colorado State University professor who pioneered the seasonal hurricane forecast, would walk through his offices on August 20 and ring a bell.
The weeks from about August 20 to the end of September are when the Atlantic Ocean between the Caribbean Sea and Cape Verde is supercharged off the coast of Africa. This region of ocean is called the Main Development Region, and it is where the vast majority of the most deadly, destructive, and infamous hurricanes in history were born.
As a result of climate change, which has raised global average temperatures around 1 ° C, meteorologists have been actively updating their seasonal forecasts. A warmer-than-normal Atlantic Ocean combined with diminished wind gusts across the basin has created consensus that there will be more storms.
Earlier this month, Colorado State increased its outlook from August to 24 storms, up from July 20. The next day, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration increased its view to a spread from 19 to 25, up from 13 to 19 in May. Forecasters working for the federal government have never called for 25 storms in a single season before, said Gerry Bell, lead spokesman for the U.S. Climate Action Center.
How would those tallies stack up for 2020 against an average season? It would be like undergoing two full seasons in one year. The 30-year average is for 12 storms to be named in a six-month Atlantic season. A system is called when its winds reach 39 miles per hour and it becomes a tropical storm.
An interesting side note is that many of this year’s weaker storms have received some criticism of the National Hurricane Center. The claim, often repeated by deniers of climate change, is that now storms are being named that would not have been mentioned in the past, thus bringing the numbers up. It is a false claim, according to Louis Uccellini, director of the National Water Service. “We have not changed the criteria for actually naming storms,” he says, “we just have better ways to identify them.”
The Water Service currently has a relatively new geostationary satellite looking at the Atlantic Ocean that can see water in granular detail. The images are so precise that Uccellini often pulls his phone to show the images that the Water Service receives from outer space. That is just one of the tools that forecasters use in naming these systems.
When August winds and people from Texas to New England shake off the damage from the storms that have already hit their heads, the chances are high that they have not even seen half of it.
– With the help of Eric Roston
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