Half of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season still remains, hurricane experts warned Thursday, three days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in one of the nation’s most destructive natural disasters.
“We have had a lot of activity, and we’ve got a lot to go,” said William Gray, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who has been issuing hurricane-season forecasts for 22 years.
Like Gray, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also predicts the current trend of destructive hurricane seasons to continue for 15 years or more.
Earlier this year, Gray predicted this season would be one of the most stormy in decades, and today, he said, he’ll update his numbers slightly, with the same bottom line: “It’s going to be pretty active for the rest of the year.”
Gray calculated there’s about a 45 percent chance another major storm will strike the U.S. in September – double the odds during an average hurricane season.
Sept. 10 is generally considered the midpoint of the hurricane season, said Chris Landsea, with the NOAA Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Fla. Last month, NOAA, like Gray, predicted a very stormy season, with nine to 11 hurricanes.
“We’ve had four – Dennis, Emily, Irene and Katrina,” Landsea said. “We probably have quite a lot ahead of us.”
Both NOAA and Gray’s research team base their forecasts on a detailed understanding of the global atmospheric and oceanic phenomena that contribute to hurricane formation. The global situation has been good for hurricanes since 1995, they said.
Although relatively few hurricanes formed in the Atlantic from the 1970s to 1994, hurricane seasons from the 1920s to the 1960s were extremely busy, Landsea said. If the pattern continues to swing every 25 to 45 years, we could be looking at another 15 to 30 years of intense hurricane seasons, he said.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
