HURRICANE season starts 1 JUN 14, the predictions are for fewer Atlantic and more Pacific storms. I live in Virginia and there is a chance the Commonwealth could experience a hurricane. AND to all Virginians, the sales tax holiday for disaster preparedness supplies ends midnight Saturday 31 MAY 14. From +NPR and +Mother Jones .....
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Optimism and hurricanes are not words we usually utter together, but the Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1st, and today government forecasters offered some cautious optimism. They are expecting a relatively quiet year. Here's NPR's Jon Hamilton.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued this year's hurricane outlook from New York City's Office of Emergency Management. It's just a mile or so from areas of lower Manhattan that were under water after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. NOAA's administrator, Kathryn Sullivan, offered a preview of 2014.
KATHRYN SULLIVAN: NOAA predicts the Atlantic hurricane season in 2014 will have a range of eight to 13 tropical storms, three to six of which will become hurricanes.
HAMILTON: That's fewer tropical storms and hurricanes than in an average year. But Sullivan also cautioned that predictions are about probability not certainty.
SULLIVAN: Any section of our coastline can be hit by a severe tropical storm. And one storm, whatever the probabilities are, one storm can wreak tremendous havoc.
HAMILTON: Sullivan has reason to be cautious about seasonal forecasts. A year ago, NOAA predicted a busy season with at least seven hurricanes. They got just two and they were small ones. Still, NOAA's May forecasts are right about two-thirds of the time. And forecasters say this year there is strong evidence that conditions in the Atlantic won't be conducive to hurricane formation. One reason is water temperature. Gerry Bell, who is in charge of NOAA's seasonal forecast, says that since 1995, hurricanes have been fueled in part by unusually warm waters in the Atlantic.
GERRY BELL: This year, the Atlantic Ocean temperatures have cooled off and the computer models are indicating that we'll have a continuation of these near normal Atlantic temperatures through the season.
HAMILTON: Another factor likely to discourage hurricanes is what appears to be an emerging El Nino. El Nino starts in the Pacific but ultimately, it changes the wind patterns halfway around the world, in the Atlantic. Ben Kirtman, from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School, says El Nino produces winds with more vertical shear, meaning the strength or direction is different at higher altitudes than it is closer to the ground.
BEN KIRTMAN: Hurricanes like to form where there's very little change with height in the strength of the winds. And so if there's a big change in strength with height, you just have this shearing effect that tends to reduce the number of hurricanes.
HAMILTON: And if the shear is strong enough, it can actually rip them apart. Kirtman says El Nino hasn't arrived yet. But he's pretty sure it will, based on his monitoring of about 100 different forecasts from across North America.
KIRTMAN: And I would say 65 or 70 percent of those 100 forecasts are calling for El Nino conditions to develop in the next two or three months. So, that's certainly good reason to have fairly high confidence that we are going to get an El Nino.
HAMILTON: Kirtman says El Nino conditions do more than discourage hurricanes. They also tend to increase rainfall in the southern part of the U.S.
KIRTMAN: And in fact, if this El Nino persists through the winter season like we think it's going to, there might be a little bit of a break in terms of the California drought, which has been very, very severe.
HAMILTON: However, the arrival of El Nino doesn't guarantee either rainfall or protection from potentially devastating hurricanes. During an El Nino in 1992, Hurricane Andrew became a Category 5 storm that destroyed Homestead, Florida. Andrew eventually killed 65 people and caused $26 billion in damage. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
Hurricane Amanda in the eastern Pacific on May 25
Usually, people living in the United States don't pay much attention to hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, the other
basin where megastorms that can affect North America are formed.
Mostly, these storms wallop Mexico, or travel harmlessly out to sea. So,
given the standard myopia of the media, we rarely hear much about them.
But this year, perhaps, we ought to be paying more attention. The eastern Pacific hurricane season started on May 15, and already, with its first storm, it has set an ominous record. The hurricane in question, named Amanda, spun up south of the Baja California peninsula Thursday, and on Sunday it attained maximum sustained wind speeds of 155 miles per hour—just below Category 5 status. Or as National Hurricane Center forecaster Stacy Stewart put it when the storm reached its peak strength: "Amanda is now the strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific basin during the satellite era."
This record is notable for two reasons. First of all, even though there remains a great deal of uncertainty and debate about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming, the fact is that in many hurricane basins across the world, new storm intensity records have been set just since the year 2000. Amanda therefore fits into this broader pattern.
Second, there is growing evidence that El Niño conditions—characterized by an eastward shift of warm water across the great Pacific Ocean, with global weather ramifications—are developing in the Pacific right now. The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now gives us a greater than 65 percent chance that El Niño conditions will develop by this summer.
In El Niño years, we tend to see a great firing of hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific, and a suppression of these storms in the Atlantic. In fact, the strongest storm ever recorded in the eastern Pacific, Category 5 Hurricane Linda in 1997, occurred during the last super-strong El Niño year.
So if El Nino does occur, Amanda may not be the strongest storm that we see in the Eastern Pacific this year. That's potentially bad news for Mexico. In fact, there is even a tiny possibility that during an El Niño year, a storm might be able to travel as far north as Southern California (albeit in a pretty weakened state), as Hurricane Linda was at one point forecast to do. In fact, recent historical work on past hurricanes has revealed that in 1858, San Diego was struck by what appears to have been a Category 1 hurricane.
As of now, Hurricane Amanda has weakened and is not expected to affect land in a serious way. But this is definitely a storm whose significance extends well beyond its immediate impact.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects a
relatively quiet Atlantic hurricane season, with three to six hurricanes
developing between June 1 and the end of November. Forecasters say they
expect El Nino conditions to develop in the coming months, which should
produce winds in the Atlantic that discourage hurricane formation.
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Optimism and hurricanes are not words we usually utter together, but the Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1st, and today government forecasters offered some cautious optimism. They are expecting a relatively quiet year. Here's NPR's Jon Hamilton.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued this year's hurricane outlook from New York City's Office of Emergency Management. It's just a mile or so from areas of lower Manhattan that were under water after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. NOAA's administrator, Kathryn Sullivan, offered a preview of 2014.
KATHRYN SULLIVAN: NOAA predicts the Atlantic hurricane season in 2014 will have a range of eight to 13 tropical storms, three to six of which will become hurricanes.
HAMILTON: That's fewer tropical storms and hurricanes than in an average year. But Sullivan also cautioned that predictions are about probability not certainty.
SULLIVAN: Any section of our coastline can be hit by a severe tropical storm. And one storm, whatever the probabilities are, one storm can wreak tremendous havoc.
HAMILTON: Sullivan has reason to be cautious about seasonal forecasts. A year ago, NOAA predicted a busy season with at least seven hurricanes. They got just two and they were small ones. Still, NOAA's May forecasts are right about two-thirds of the time. And forecasters say this year there is strong evidence that conditions in the Atlantic won't be conducive to hurricane formation. One reason is water temperature. Gerry Bell, who is in charge of NOAA's seasonal forecast, says that since 1995, hurricanes have been fueled in part by unusually warm waters in the Atlantic.
GERRY BELL: This year, the Atlantic Ocean temperatures have cooled off and the computer models are indicating that we'll have a continuation of these near normal Atlantic temperatures through the season.
HAMILTON: Another factor likely to discourage hurricanes is what appears to be an emerging El Nino. El Nino starts in the Pacific but ultimately, it changes the wind patterns halfway around the world, in the Atlantic. Ben Kirtman, from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School, says El Nino produces winds with more vertical shear, meaning the strength or direction is different at higher altitudes than it is closer to the ground.
BEN KIRTMAN: Hurricanes like to form where there's very little change with height in the strength of the winds. And so if there's a big change in strength with height, you just have this shearing effect that tends to reduce the number of hurricanes.
HAMILTON: And if the shear is strong enough, it can actually rip them apart. Kirtman says El Nino hasn't arrived yet. But he's pretty sure it will, based on his monitoring of about 100 different forecasts from across North America.
KIRTMAN: And I would say 65 or 70 percent of those 100 forecasts are calling for El Nino conditions to develop in the next two or three months. So, that's certainly good reason to have fairly high confidence that we are going to get an El Nino.
HAMILTON: Kirtman says El Nino conditions do more than discourage hurricanes. They also tend to increase rainfall in the southern part of the U.S.
KIRTMAN: And in fact, if this El Nino persists through the winter season like we think it's going to, there might be a little bit of a break in terms of the California drought, which has been very, very severe.
HAMILTON: However, the arrival of El Nino doesn't guarantee either rainfall or protection from potentially devastating hurricanes. During an El Nino in 1992, Hurricane Andrew became a Category 5 storm that destroyed Homestead, Florida. Andrew eventually killed 65 people and caused $26 billion in damage. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
Hurricane Amanda Just Set an Ominous New Record
The first eastern Pacific hurricane of 2014 set a new intensity record. Here's why we could see even stronger storms before the year is over.
| Tue May 27, 2014 3:56 PM EDT
Hurricane Amanda in the eastern Pacific on May 25 But this year, perhaps, we ought to be paying more attention. The eastern Pacific hurricane season started on May 15, and already, with its first storm, it has set an ominous record. The hurricane in question, named Amanda, spun up south of the Baja California peninsula Thursday, and on Sunday it attained maximum sustained wind speeds of 155 miles per hour—just below Category 5 status. Or as National Hurricane Center forecaster Stacy Stewart put it when the storm reached its peak strength: "Amanda is now the strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific basin during the satellite era."
This record is notable for two reasons. First of all, even though there remains a great deal of uncertainty and debate about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming, the fact is that in many hurricane basins across the world, new storm intensity records have been set just since the year 2000. Amanda therefore fits into this broader pattern.
Second, there is growing evidence that El Niño conditions—characterized by an eastward shift of warm water across the great Pacific Ocean, with global weather ramifications—are developing in the Pacific right now. The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now gives us a greater than 65 percent chance that El Niño conditions will develop by this summer.
In El Niño years, we tend to see a great firing of hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific, and a suppression of these storms in the Atlantic. In fact, the strongest storm ever recorded in the eastern Pacific, Category 5 Hurricane Linda in 1997, occurred during the last super-strong El Niño year.
So if El Nino does occur, Amanda may not be the strongest storm that we see in the Eastern Pacific this year. That's potentially bad news for Mexico. In fact, there is even a tiny possibility that during an El Niño year, a storm might be able to travel as far north as Southern California (albeit in a pretty weakened state), as Hurricane Linda was at one point forecast to do. In fact, recent historical work on past hurricanes has revealed that in 1858, San Diego was struck by what appears to have been a Category 1 hurricane.
As of now, Hurricane Amanda has weakened and is not expected to affect land in a serious way. But this is definitely a storm whose significance extends well beyond its immediate impact.
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