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While the last couple of weeks have been the quietest period during a hurricane season in nearly 56 years, forecasters say they expect this lull in storm activity to change by mid-month.
“My advice for the general public is to enjoy the quiet while we have it, and let’s remember that we still have about half of the hurricane season to go,” Phil Klotzbach, Colorado State University’s Tropical Meteorology Project meteorologist and research scientist, said on Wednesday in an emailed comment to the Cayman Compass.
He said the extremely warm Atlantic and the trend towards La Niña “could favor a busy end to the season in the Caribbean”.
The last named storm this year was Hurricane Ernesto on 12 Aug.
Klotzbach said the last hurricane season with no named storms from 13 Aug. to 4 Sept. was in 1968.
Turn expected in mid-September
There are four areas of weather disturbances being monitored in the Atlantic basin as at Wednesday afternoon, and forecasters have given each system low chances of development through the next seven days.
Klotzbach said the recent quiet period has taken “all of us seasonal forecasters by surprise, so my confidence in any forecasts right now is very low”.
CSU’s Tropical Meteorology Project, in its latest two-week forecast released Tuesday afternoon, still calls for an above-normal season overall “given that large-scale conditions appear to become more favorable around the middle of September”.
“Global model ensembles highlight the potential for a strong African easterly wave emerging off of the west African coast in 8–9 days. It is still too early to determine what this system’s future would be,” the forecast said.
With the exception of the western Caribbean and southern Gulf of Mexico, it said, “large-scale environmental conditions look relatively unfavorable for the next approximately 7 days but look to get more conducive for tropical cyclone activity towards the middle of September”.
CSU said that it will not be issuing a new seasonal forecast.
It still maintains 23 named storms for the season, five of which have already formed.
In its season discussion report, CSU said that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season got off to an extremely fast start with Hurricane Beryl becoming the earliest Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic on record.
Hurricanes Debby and Ernesto, it said, followed in early and mid-August, respectively, leading to a “well above-average season through the middle part of August”.
However, since Ernesto dissipated on 20 Aug., it said the Atlantic has had no named storm activity.
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