The hurricane season that wasn't

Boy, remember when this hurricane season was going to make last year look like nothing? Those were the days, huh?

The forecast service AccuWeather said the northeast United States was "staring down the barrel of a gun," and respected forecasters were calling for 15 to 17 named storms.

But like a meteorological Ishtar, the 2006 hurricane season, which officially ends today, failed to deliver.

Just nine named storms formed. The worst conditions the Northeast received came from Tropical Storm Beryl, with 50 mph winds and a 1-foot storm surge in July, and rain from remnants of Hurricane Ernesto, which wiped out one day's play of the U.S. Open tennis tournament in September.

The season's first storm, Alberto, yielded Houston's closest "brush" with the tropical weather. It came within 700 miles of Southeast Texas in June.

The relatively quiet season followed that of 2005, notable not only for its volume - last year's 28 named storms shattered the single-year record - but the beastliness of several storms, including Katrina, Rita and Wilma, three of the most intense hurricanes ever to traverse the Gulf of Mexico.

This year, Alberto and Ernesto brought the most trouble, causing about a dozen U.S. deaths and $100 million in damages. Last year's comparative totals were more than a hundredfold worse: in excess of 2,000 deaths and $120 billion in damages.

Actually, if those numbers are accurate, it's a thousandfold difference. Either way, it's no comparison. What the heck happened?

[Two factors] in particular are responsible for dampening this year's hurricane season, meteorologists say.

One was greater-than-normal levels of dust, blown off the Sahel region of Western Africa over the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Storms need warm, moist air to develop and thrive. Dry air chokes them.

There also was considerable dust in 2005, but storms like Katrina and Rita developed farther westward in the Atlantic, closer to the United States, providing moister air during their formative stages.

The second factor, which came into play during the second half of the season, was El Nino, a natural warming of ocean temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific, which tends to moderate Atlantic hurricane seasons. Before this year's season began, scientists were not forecasting an El Nino.

Does this augur well for next year? Who knows?

Three months before El Nino developed this summer, the computer models still didn't see it coming. So, any chance of forecasting ocean conditions beginning next June may be somewhat hopeless.

"The bottom line," [Weather Underground's Jeff] Masters said, "is that we really don't understand how to make long-range forecasts that are all that good."

Would have been nice to have been told that before all the doom-and-gloom forecasts this spring, but better late than never. I'm of course happy things turned out this way, but I don't regret the money we spent this year on storm shutters, nor do I expect to cancel our plans to buy more of them to increase our coverage. It's fine to be giddy, but there's no call to be foolish.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on December 01, 2006 to Hurricane Katrina | TrackBack