Quiet Hurricane Season 2013 a ‘Head Scratcher’ for Embarrassed Forecasters

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season, which forecasters had predicted might be more active than normal, has turned out to be something of a dud so far as an unusual calm hangs over the tropics.

As the season heads into the historic peak for activity, it will even enter the record books as marking the quietest start to any Atlantic hurricane season in decades.

“It certainly looks like nearly of a forecast bust,” said Jeff Masters, a hurricane expert and director of meteorology at the Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com).

“Virtually each of the (forecast) groups were calling for above-normal hurricanes and intensive hurricanes and we haven’t even had a hurricane at all, with the season half over,” he said.

With records going back to 1851, Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the U.S. National Hurricane Center, said there were only 17 years when the first Atlantic hurricane formed after Sept. 4.

The all-time record was set in 1905, he said, when the first hurricane materialized on Oct. 8.

In a median season the main hurricane shows up by Aug. 10, usually followed by a second hurricane on Aug. 28 and the first major hurricane by Sept. 4.

Since the dawn of the satellite era throughout the mid-1960s, Feltgen said the most recent date for the first hurricane to achieve was set by Gustav when it made its debut on Sept. 11, 2002.

If this year’s first hurricane comes anytime after 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) on Wednesday, it would replace Gustav since the modern-day record holder, Feltgen said.

Seven named storms were spawned by the 2013 season to date, including Fernand, which killed 13 people in central Mexico late last month.

Most of the storms was small, weak systems, however, proving an embarrassment to experts who had predicted an active season in reports that are eagerly awaited by the insurance and energy industries as well as many coastal homeowners.

“Statistical models can generally reasonably well replicate hurricane activity … but there are always going to be years in the event you bust,” said Phil Klotzbach, a Colorado State University climatologist who heads a team that issues one the most important closely watched long-range hurricane forecasts.

“We issue our final seasonal forecast in early August. But if we did put out a mid-season update, i would certainly go into reverse from the prediction considerably,” he said.

Colorado State University slightly lowered its seasonal forecast on Aug. 2. Nonetheless it still said 2013 would see above-average activity, with eight hurricanes and three that grow to be major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale.

Other prominent forecasts, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), were predicting an “above normal” season last month. an ordinary season has six hurricanes.

‘A HEAD SCRATCHER’

The jury continues to be out on what exactly has put such a damper this year over the Atlantic basin and the Caribbean, where millions of folks live in hurricane danger zones.

Tuesday marks the statistical “peak day” of the season, which runs from June 1 through Nov. 30, and researchers say significant amounts of dry air and wind shear have helped keep a lid on hurricane formation.

The El Nino weather phenomenon - a warming of the tropical Pacific - that's part of the mix of unstable ingredients which will affect hurricane formation, might be not a component this year, making the lack of storm activity harder to explain.

“It’s certainly a head scratcher,” said Masters, who said he thought wind shear were near normal this year and warmer than average sea temperatures inside the Atlantic favored storms.

He noted that dry air, from Africa as well as rarely mentioned flows associated with an extreme drought in northeast Brazil, can be a factor “helping to shut down this year’s hurricane season.”

Forecasters say a system expected to emerge off the coast of Africa may strengthen into a hurricane by early next week. But whatever happens in the coming days, Feltgen cautioned it was still too early to put in writing off 2013 as a year when tropical weather was unpredictable.

“We are at mid-point of the six-month hurricane season,” he said. “It is a mistake to believe that the second half the season would resemble the first half,” he said.

The first hurricane in 2001, Erin, only formed on Sept. 9, Feltgen said. “That season ended with 15 named storms including nine hurricanes, four of which became major hurricanes.”

(Reporting by Tom Brown; editing by Christopher Wilson)