Hurricane season start may move up
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 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.
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.
Since 2000, 11 storms have been named before the official start of hurricane season.
“Many of the May systems are short-lived, hybrid (subtropical) systems that are now being identified because of better monitoring and policy changes that now name subtropical storms,” wrote Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and public affairs specialist at the National Hurricane Center, in an email. “In 2020, NHC issued 36 ‘special’ Tropical Weather Outlooks prior to June 1st.”
The average date of a season’s first name storm has shifted upward by about a month since 1970.
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.