This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has so far lagged behind long-term trends, generated oddities and left seasoned forecasters scratching their heads. But now it’s finally shaking off the doldrums and spinning up storms.
Tropical Storm Humberto formed Wednesday north of the Caribbean and will likely soon be joined by a second system to its west. In the meantime, Hurricane Gabrielle is barreling across the world’s second-largest ocean on a collision course with the Azores and possibly even Spain and Portugal, though as a hybrid storm.
Across the Atlantic, eight storms have been named this season; just two have reached hurricane status. Ten storms typically form by now, four of which become hurricanes, with two of them becoming major systems that pack winds of 111 miles (179 kilometers) per hour or more. Forecasters had predicted an unusually active season. The ocean also passed the peak of its six-month season in early September with hardly a cloud across its tropical expanse.
Seasonal changes and shifts in weather patterns have cracked open the door for a more active second half for the Atlantic season, which ends on Nov. 30. These will likely yield greater tropical activity, said Alex DaSilva, a meteorologist with commercial-forecaster AccuWeather Inc. “We will be catching up on some of those numbers in the next couple of weeks.”
The scarcity of tropical threats has thus far spared US energy, agriculture, transportation, retail and insurance markets of shocks. It’s a stark change from last year, when Hurricanes Helene and Milton collectively killed at least 277 people and caused $113 billion in losses and damages. Hurricane Beryl, meanwhile, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands in Texas, killed 69 people across the US and Caribbean and caused an additional $7 billion in losses.
In contrast, recent powerful Typhoons have swept the western Pacific, including Ragasa, which hit Taiwan hard this week and raised alarms in Hong Kong.
The Atlantic’s first half passed without much notice for a couple of reasons. First, larger weather patterns across the eastern US and the ocean itself steered storms away from the Caribbean Islands, the energy-rich Gulf and North America’s mainland, said Dan Brown, branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the US National Hurricane Center in Miami.
In addition, there have been injections of dry air that choked off developing storms and a wide swath of calm and stable air in the region where many storms form in late August and September, said Ryan Truchelut, owner of commercial-forecaster WeatherTiger.
But as Brown pointed out, the weather always changes and so it is with the Atlantic, both in terms of the number of storms and their potential impacts.
Gabrielle remains a hurricane. It headed for Portugal and Spain — and prompted rare hurricane threats in the Azores. “The first place that had a hurricane warning in the entire Atlantic this year was the Azores, which is very weird,” Truchelut said.
Humberto is spinning on a track that may take it between North Carolina and Bermuda and a second storm — Imelda, if it is named — is likely to join it, which will complicate the forecast. When two storms come within a few hundred miles of each other, they can influence their paths in a phenomenon called the Fujiwhara effect. There is a chance that may happen in the coming week, which raises the threat for the US East Coast, Brown said.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Brown said.
Photo: A destroyed house following 2022’s Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg
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