FYI on Hurricane Season

According to the National Weather Service, hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov 1, which means the 2011 season is officially here!

Here are some interesting facts about the season:

June 1 is the start of the Atlantic Basin Hurricane Season but tropical activity typically remains fairly light throughout the month of June. Of course there are several exceptions to the rule, but as you can see in the graph below this "slowness" of activity usually continues well into and through the month of July. Since records began in 1886, there have been just 68 named storms during June. Compare that number to the month of September when a total of 375 named storms have developed.

Hurricanes in June are even more infrequent. Since 1965, only 7 hurricanes have formed in June, the last one of which was 15 years ago. Even the record-setting 2005 season waited until early July to spawn its first hurricane.

If a storm develops off the Southeast United States coast, it usually pushes off to the northeast away from the coast. However, there are times that these storms will become quite stubborn and linger off the coast creating windy conditions, beach erosion and big waves for areas along the coast.

If a storm or hurricane develops in the western Caribbean, they tend to migrate to the west toward Central America (sometimes ending up in the western Gulf) or they make more of track toward the northwest eventually ending up in the central or eastern Gulf.

Development in the Gulf? Well, there is no way out of the Gulf. What we mean is that any tropical storm or hurricane that develops in the Gulf always make a landfall - either the Gulf Coast of the U.S. or Mexico.

So….what are the predictions for this season in total? The experts are predicting a very active season. According to the National Weather Service:

“The country has been largely spared the last two years, with no hurricane landfalls since 2008, a relatively rare occurrence. According to WSI, the United States has not gone through a three-year period without a hurricane landfall since the 1860s. Our recent good fortune in avoiding landfalling hurricanes is not likely to last,"

"Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean sea surface temperatures are particularly warm this year, and we expect more development in these regions and less in the eastern tropical Atlantic. Storms developing in the Gulf and Caribbean are a much greater threat to make landfall along the United States' coast than those that develop off the coast of Africa."