We don’t want to be the ones to tempt fate, or to jinx a good thing, but forecast models continue to advertise another strangely stormless week in the Atlantic, which could get us into early September without another tropical system.
If the 7-day outlook from the National Hurricane Center materializes, this means we’ll have gone two weeks – from the demise of Ernesto on August 20th – without an active tropical or subtropical system anywhere in the Atlantic, the first time that’s happened during this traditionally busy two-week window of the hurricane season since 1956.
That’s not exactly what we would’ve anticipated for late August and in the opening days of September during one of the most active hurricane seasons ever forecast. Of course, we know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when history shows us 80% of tropical activity occurs after August 26th. It’s kind of like declaring victory in the 2nd inning of a 9-inning baseball game or 12 minutes into the first quarter of a 60-minute football game.
It’s also not like the opposing team hasn’t already put up some impressive points. As we discussed last Monday, we’ve recorded more than double the average activity we typically see through this point in the season, including the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record and two U.S. hurricane landfalls. To taunt this season right now would be foolish – a little like ridiculing a first seed that still carries a healthy lead after a bad quarter.
But it’s also fair to say that if the models are right and the Atlantic is a no-show for another 7, 8, or 9 days, that’d be pretty weird, not despite the blistering start, but because of it. Hurricane Beryl which became a 165 mph Category 5 monster earlier this season wasn’t just a early-season curiosity, it was an extreme anomaly, something that could only have happened in a year where the Atlantic was so tilted for development, it made the end of June resemble late August or September. Beryls don’t happen in normal hurricane seasons before August.
This time of year, we take the forecasts day-by-day and with a grain of salt. Computer models are notoriously poor at predicting tropical formation more than just a few days out. It’s unusual we don’t see more candidates for possible development in most of our ensemble members – the scenarios we look at based on dozens of different starting conditions to account for the possibility of larger uncertainty farther out in the forecast. But there may be good reason for the lull. We’ve described ad nauseum the short-term issues plaguing the Atlantic right now, which we discussed last week will take at least another week to shake out.
So for now, we enjoy the silence because we know it will soon pick up again. 2022 went an incredible 60 days without a single tropical depression, named storm, or hurricane but ended with one of the costliest and most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history. We hope that isn’t the case, but we also don’t want the hurricane season pejoratives that inevitably come this time of year to trick us into thinking we’re off the hook. Regardless of how many storms we get in this season or in any season, it only takes one to make a bad season in South Florida, as Hurricane Andrew reminded us 32 years ago this past Saturday.