As the eighth anniversary of Hurricane Ivan’s devastation of Grand Cayman is marked, the 2012 Atlantic Basin hurricane season shows no sign of slowing down from its near record pace of named storms.
This week marks the peak of the hurricane season, which so far has spawned 13 named storms and 14 tropical cyclone expected. Tropical Depression 14 formed in the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday morning and is forecast to become Tropical Storm Nadine and then Hurricane Nadine by Friday. However, that cyclone is expected to curve into the open Atlantic Ocean and remain a so-called ‘fish storm’, not threatening any land masses.
Hurricane Ivan devastated Grand Cayman 11-12 September, 2004. The centre of the storm passed a little less than 25 miles south of the Island as a strong Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph on the morning of Sunday 12 September. Grand Cayman experienced 37 hours of tropical storm-force winds beginning the afternoon of Saturday, 11 September and they didn’t subside until Monday morning. Sustained winds of more than 100 mph were experienced for seven hours beginning early morning 12 September.
The storm damaged about 85 per cent of all buildings in Grand Cayman and caused an estimated $2.4 billion of damage. A curfew – which started out as dusk-to-dawn and was later extended a bit later – was in place almost three months afterward, ending on 9 December.
So far this year, the Cayman Islands has escaped with little effect from the 14 tropical cyclones that have formed, receiving just a bit rain from Tropical Storms Ernesto and Isaac, which respectively passed well south and north of the Islands.
However, the Atlantic Basin hurricane season doesn’t end until 30 November and the Cayman Islands are susceptible to late-season storms in October and early November. Hurricane Paloma devastated Cayman Brac and Little Cayman as a Category 4 hurricane on 8 November, 2008, and all three islands felt the fury of an unnamed hurricane in 1932 on 9 November.
This hurricane season continues to confound the forecasts of meteorologists who believed the formation of an El Niño in the equatorial Pacific Ocean would somewhat inhibit the number of tropical cyclones. However, the El Niño has not yet created the tropical cyclone-inhibiting high wind sheer in the Atlantic Basin that it was expected to.
Although there has only been one major hurricane of Category 3 or above so far this year – Hurricane Michael – the season has already spawned seven hurricanes to go with the 13 named storms. The earliest the 14th named storm ever formed in the Atlantic Basin was 7 September, when Nate reached tropical storm strength in 2005, so if Nadine forms as expected on Tuesday, this season will only be four days of the record pace.
This hurricane season will likely produce a higher-than-forecast total number of tropical cyclones, but it still won’t likely approach the 2005 Atlantic Basin record of 28 named storms. That hurricane season was so active that the National Hurricane Center in Miami ran out of storm names in October when Hurricane Wilma formed and it had to name the final six cyclones of the year using the names of letters in the Greek alphabet.
Related Videos
