Kyle sets another record as 11th named storm of hurricane season

Josephine barely hanging on as tropical storm

As Tropical Storm Josephine weakened, barely hanging on to namedstorm status in the 5 p.m. Friday advisory from the National Hurricane Center, Tropical Storm Kyle formed about 200 miles southeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, continuing a record for the number of named storms this early in the hurricane season.

Kyle is the earliest 11th named storm to form in history, breaking the previous record set by Katrina’s Aug. 24 formation in 2005. There ended up being 12 tropical storms by the end of August 15 years ago.

Kyle, with sustained winds of 40 mph, is forecast to head out to sea without threatening land.

Josephine, which formed in the mid-Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, is headed on a path toward the Caribbean islands, but the current forecast track shows it will curve away from Florida’s east coast.

Josephine, like Kyle, also has 40 mph highest sustained winds, down from 45 mph in the previous update and is moving westnorthwest at 16 mph. The minimum sustained winds for a tropical storm are 39 mph.

“It’s going to go into an environment where it’s going to start losing its strength, so that’s good,” Dennis Feltgen, with the National Hurricane Center, said Thursday. “It’s going to run into a bunch of wind shear.”

Josephine is expected to bring up to 3 inches of rain to portions of the northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, according to the latest advisory.

The storm is expected to move generally westnorthwestward across the tropical Atlantic over the next several days. It is forecast to turn to the northwest late this weekend or early next week, according to the NHC.

“(One) scenario, supported by several of the global models, is that the cyclone decays to a tropical wave” in the next three to four days, according to an 11 a.m. NHC forecast discussion.

Over the weekend, the center of the storm is likely to pass to the northeast of the Leeward Islands. As of 5 p.m., the storm was located 460 miles east-southeast of the islands, which mark the boundary between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

“We have it curving off the Atlantic coastline,” Feltgen said. “We don’t see this, right now, as any threat to the state of Florida or the United States.”

Kyle became the second named storm of August. Neither Josephine nor Kyle is currently forecast to reach hurricane strength.

In July, there were five tropical storms: Edouard, Fay, Gonzalo, Hanna and Isaias. Other named storms this year have included Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal and Dolly. Tropical Storm Arthur formed in mid-May, making this the sixth straight year that a named storm formed before the official start of hurricane season on June 1.

Virtually all estimates for this hurricane season predict an above-average number of storms, due to unusually warm ocean temperatures and global climate factors that are likely to reduce the highaltitude winds that can prevent the formation of hurricanes.

The hurricane experts at Colorado State University said in their latest forecast for the 2020 season, issued last week, that they expect 24 named storms, 12 hurricanes and five major hurricanes this year. That’s up from its July 8 forecast, in which they predicted 19 to 20 named storms.

If this latest prediction is accurate, the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season will be the second-busiest on record, behind only 2005, the year that spawned 28 storms in total, including Katrina and Wilma.

The remaining names for 2020 are Laura, Marco, Nana, Omar, Paulette, Rene, Sally, Teddy, Vicky and Wilfred.

Meanwhile, the conditions over the Atlantic that have been keeping storms at bay are about to expire. Dust carried across the ocean from Africa is disappearing, sea temperatures are creeping warmer, and storm-killing wind shears are going away — changes that are combining to clear the way for storms to form and grow stronger.