Anyway, if you haven't encouraged a fellow blogger today, take them to lunch and do so.
As for the Hurricane Season, this just came in. Hurricane season might seem been pretty tame so far, particularly in light of the predictions for a highly active year. Through the first seven weeks, a hurricane and two tropical storms have emerged, about average activity.
But the meanest stretch – the seven weeks from mid-August through early October – is here and “now the game starts,” said Stanley Goldenberg, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Waters in the tropical Atlantic are heating up. The atmosphere in the deep tropics is becoming more moist. The upper-level winds are easing. And more robust tropical waves are rolling off the coast of Africa.
Possibly adding fuel, La Nina, the large-scale atmospheric force that promotes storm formation, is kicking in, experts say. As a result, forecasters predict 18 to 20 named storms, including 10 to 12 hurricanes, will develop this season. They project five to six will be intense, with winds greater than 110 mph.
An average season sees 11 named storms, including six hurricanes, two intense.
“People say in August, it sure seems quiet,” said Goldenberg, who works for NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division in Miami. “I say just wait, the season hasn’t really gotten started.”
On average, five hurricanes, including two major ones, form between mid August and the first week of October. However, since 1995, when the Atlantic basin entered an era of heightened intensity, many seasons have seen considerably more systems than that.
Other experts say a large ridge of high pressure over the Atlantic has pushed tropical systems so far to the south that they don’t have enough “leverage” from the Earth’s gravitational forces to spin up. But that ridge is expected to move farther north in coming weeks.
Although the busiest stretch of the season goes into early October, the rest of that month also could be active. Systems tend to develop in the western Caribbean, where water temperatures remain warm and wind shear low.
“The reminder to people is that we’re predicting an extremely active year,” he said. “Whether it is or not, it only takes one hurricane to cause a disaster.”
We get the same forecast every year. It's meaningless.
