Weather forecasters are a little more retrospective.
In 2001, forecasters had announced that they believed that since 1995, the tropics had been in a cycle of more and stronger storms. Such periods can last 25 to 40 years.
The hurricane season that ended Sunday, Nov. 30, was quiet. So was the year before that. Only three seasons since 1995 have been below average. We just went through two of them.
This followed some of the busiest, and most damaging, years on record.
Now, “people are saying, ‘well, we’ve had two quiet seasons in a row. Are we out of this high-activity period?’ The answer is, I don’t know,” Gerry Bell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last week.
“There was no indication as of the start of this season that we were out of that high-activity era,” said Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “Sometimes these transitions happen quickly. But it’s still a bit too early to say.”
This year, only eight storms reached at least tropical storm strength, 39 mph, and earned names. That’s the lowest total since 1997.
Of those, six became hurricanes. And just two became major storms, of at least Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with top sustained winds of at least 111 mph.
NOAA’s historical average, Bell said, is 12, six and three.
Bell said a combination of atmospheric features tamped down storm activity. Among them:
Very strong vertical wind shear, the crisscross of winds that tends to weaken storms’ circulation.
A weaker West African monsoon event, increased stability in the atmosphere and an increased occurrence of sinking air.
Drier air across the tropical Atlantic.
This year, only one Atlantic hurricane struck the United States: Arthur, in July. Which means that, for the ninth year in a row, dating back to Wilma in 2005, Florida has been spared a hurricane landfall. That’s the longest streak as far back as hurricane records go, to before the Civil War, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Florida was hammered in 2004, with four hurricane landfalls, including Frances and Jeanne locally. And 2005’s record 28 named storms included Wilma, which did billions in damage in South Florida.
Since then, Bell said, “Florida has had a bit of a break. But there’s no way to know if that will continue. It goes in periods.”
What worries forecasters most are the short memories of locals, on top of the numbers who’ve moved to Florida in the past nine years and know only what they’ve seen on television.
Bill Johnson, Palm Beach County’s emergency management director, said he sometimes wonders if just a small hurricane would be a little beneficial, since it would give responders some real-time experience, and it would wake up local residents’ “hurricane amnesia,” as he calls it.
“Obviously we have been blessed,” he said. “But it creates a lot of challenges for us as well.”
©2014 Austin American-Statesman, Texas. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
