Change to start of hurricane season weighed
Atlantic hurricane season doesn’t officially start until June 1, but that could soon change. A committee at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is working to decide whether the start date of Atlantic hurricane season should be moved forward to May 15.
The change would reflect an increasing tendency for early-season storms to form ahead of the internationally agreed-upon June 1 conventional start date in an effort to respond to observed trends.
The National Hurricane Center has already announced plans to begin issuing routine tropical weather outlooks starting on May 15.
The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season sparked to life early last year when Tropical Storm Arthur formed east of Florida on May 16. It produced sustained winds of 39 mph at Alligator River Bridge on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Before its formation, the waterlogged disturbance interacted with another atmospheric wave to drop 10 inches of rain on Marathon, Fla., 8 inches on Fort Lauderdale and 6 inches on Miami.
It was the sixth consecutive season in a row to feature a preseason storm that formed before the official June 1 start date. Tropical Storm Alberto in late May 2018 brought nearly a foot of rainfall near Lake Okeechobee in Florida, while also producing 65-mph winds over the Gulf of Mexico. A storm surge of roughly three feet was observed in the Florida Panhandle.
In 2015, Tropical Storm Ana scraped the East Coast in mid-May, with a gust to 62 mph and up to 6.7 inches of rainfall in North Carolina.
Also forming early in the past six seasons were a number of subtropical storms — hybrid systems that bear the characteristics of ordinary mid-latitude and tropical cyclones — which began receiving names in 2002.
Andrea in May 2019 was a small subtropical blob that meandered in the Atlantic for a few days, and Arlene in April 2017 started subtropical before becoming a tropical storm and tracing a loop in the middle of fish territory.
Since 2000, 11 storms have been named before the official start of hurricane season.
These unscheduled outlooks, which aren’t otherwise issued until June 1, were issued in response to Arthur and Bertha.
In its annual hurricane plan, the World Meteorological Organization announced the National Hurricane Center “will determine a quantitative threshold for adding or removing dates from the official Atlantic Hurricane Season,” and “will then examine the need for … potentially moving the beginning of hurricane season to May 15.”
The average date of a season’s first name storm has shifted upward by about a month since 1970. At first glance, it would be easy to attribute that to climate change — but better technology and satellites in today’s day and age mean meteorologists are able to track and name storms that otherwise may have been missed. Subsequently, the shifting date is likely a product of both better detection and warming oceans.
There have been calls for years to revise the official start date of Atlantic hurricane season to May 15, matching the first day of hurricane season in the east Pacific. June 1 is an arbitrarily chosen date; some think it’s time to change the definition to reflect reality.
Others, including former Federal Emergency Management Agency director W. Craig Fugate, have expressed little interest in the semantics of when hurricane season starts, noting that a changed date would do little to spur public preparation. E&E News reported that only two preseason storms since 1954 have ever elicited a major disaster declaration from FEMA.
“I guess the question that I’ve asked before is … are we trying to define the Atlantic hurricane season or the Atlantic piece of junk season?” wrote Philip Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, in an email. “Since 1950, we’ve only had three hurricanes prior to 1 June. We had Able in May of 1951, Alma in May of 1970 and Alex in January of 2016.”
As it stands, fewer than 100 days remain until the official start of hurricane season this year, and after a record 30 named storms in 2020, this season could once again be active. A La Nina weather pattern, coupled with myriad other atmospheric factors, could load the dice toward another challenging season.