By J.C. Bruce
The doldrums of summer are over, and with Labor Day we bolt into the busy autumn news season, the frequent topic of which will be the upcoming elections. But there is much, much more that we will be covering.
Let’s get it started with a quiz.
Which of these stories have you NOT seen in the news recently:
Mitch McConnell makes miraculous recovery.
Donald Trump admits he lost the 2020 election.
Gasoline drops to $3 a gallon.
Hurricanes rake Florida.
All of the above.
I’m sure you guessed Number 5, and that’s what we will talk about briefly today because we are on the verge of setting a new record.
Despite having had five named tropical storms this hurricane season, we’ve had no hurricanes. If this continues through the end of the week, it will mean that whenever—if ever—the first hurricane spins up, it will be the latest in the modern satellite era.
And as you can see in the above map from the National Hurricane Center, the Gulf and Atlantic are currently storm-free.
Meteorologists began discovering and tracking hurricanes using satellites in 1966, and the latest dates hurricanes formed in that time were on Sept. 11 — in 2002 with Hurricane Gustav, and Hurricane Humberto in 2013.
If the Atlantic and Gulf remain completely free of hurricanes through Saturday (Sept. 12), this year will officially shatter the modern record for the quietest start to any hurricane season.
This is primarily driven by a powerful El Niño pattern in the Pacific Ocean, as we have written about here before.
Numerous sources explain that El Niños create extremely strong wind shear across the Caribbean and tropical Atlantic that tears weather patterns apart before they can strengthen into full-blown hurricanes.
And, yes, this year’s El Niño is more intense because of global warming.
A question you might ask is: Has there ever been a year with no hurricanes whatsoever?
The answer is: Nobody knows. Because before deploying satellites in low Earth orbit 60 years ago, there easily could have been storms that nobody ever noticed.
That said, there were no hurricanes reported in 1907 and 1914, according to the never-wrong internet, but that was before eyes in the sky, so who knows? They easily could have been in the middle of the ocean, and we would have been none the wiser.
The hurricane experts at Colorado State University have been predicting a below-average season, and so far they have been right. Their updated forecast is for a total of 4 hurricanes by the end of the season on Nov. 30, with one of them possibly becoming a Cat 3 or greater.
As noted many times, though, it only takes one Cat 5 in your backyard to ruin your picnic, so we will continue to pay close attention.
As for Mitch McConnell’s surprising recovery and lower gas prices, they could happen, I suppose. Trump acknowledging he’s been lying all along about the 2020 election? That’s definitely not in the forecast.
Further Reading:
Good news on the storm front as fewer hurricanes are expected this season
‘An Inconvenient Truth’ 20 years later: Inconveniently, too many people still in denial
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Thanks.
J.C. Bruce
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