Will The Be More Hurricanes This Year?Added : Thursday at 13:39 Maybe.... (Ed. Gonna leave it at that are you?)
Obviously, 2017 has gone down as an incredibly active Atlantic hurricane season, or has it? The season actually started off rather quietly with Tropical Storm Arlene on 19th April. There were then no named storms in May and no hurricanes until Franklin on the 6th August.
In fact, right up until and including Major Hurricane Irma the ACE index (or Accumulated Cyclone Energy) for the North Atlantic was pretty much running near the average.
Now though, we have Jose which has been loitering around Rhode Island for the last few days and Maria which is still a cat 3 hurricane.
The Atlantic Hurricane Season still has a few more weeks left (it ends on November 30), but as we head from September into October we find the ITCZ (the band of thunderstorms which create these tropical systems) heading South towards the equator :-
This is really important, as it means that whilst the thunderstorms will develop, they are unable to initiate rotation due to the lack of Coriolis Effect at the Equator.
The other thing which models are forecasting is an increase in wind shear along the Tropics over the coming week or two. This results in thunderstorms being effectively tilted to one side and unable to generate organised rotation required for tropical systems.
So, does that mean the season will wind down? Perhaps, but the end of August and September are the peak times for the Atlantic hurricane season due to the warm waters, ITCZ positioned just North of the Equator and lack of wind shear in the tropics.
Not just that, but Maria and Jose did a good job of churning up the waters out in the Mid Atlantic along their routes which means that any systems which followed their tracks would have a little less warm sea surfaces to feed off.
As to whether or not we will see any systems on par with Irma and Maria again this year? Who knows. Any meteorologist will tell you that the ingredients to make these are still on the table, but whether or not they will come together again to form these impressive systems is another matter and in the hands of the good cook... Mother Nature.
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |