With record high temperatures all over the world, why aren’t there hurricanes in the north Atlantic?
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They are coming. They usually start around now and go through November. NOAA just came out with its updated forecast.
“The outlook now includes a 70% chance of 14-21 named storms, of which 6-11 could become hurricanes, and 2-5 could become major hurricanes.”
There is lots of dust coming off the Sahara desert right now. This prohibits hurricane growth.
El Niño produces a good deal of wind sheer that basically rips hurricanes apart before they can get going.
These years typically have pretty infrequent hurricanes.
That being said, its still early in the season and the Atlantic is sitting at record high temps so it only takes a small tweak in the jetstream to turn Orlando into beachfront property for a bit.
Hurricanes take time to build. It’s a whole process. They are coming, just wait a few weeks and your hear the news talk about the first big one coming
The primary energy source of a hurricane is warm water. Even tough their have been record high temperatures this summer, the North Atlantic is still cold water.
Extra tropical cyclones do form in the North Atlantic but they are formed by cold fronts meeting warm fronts.
The baseline of global temperatures is undergoing a steady increase…but the record high temperatures this year are likely mostly due to El Nino. This phenomenon also tends to create a lot of wind shear in the tropics, which destroys hurricanes.
Also, just raising sea surface temperatures in the north Atlantic by a couple of degrees isn’t enough to make them warm enough for tropical development/maintenance.
Also, if you look at what happens to hurricanes when they move far from the equator, they sort of get elongated. The Coriolis effect is stronger when you get closer to the poles, so there’s going to be transition to sub-tropical or extra-tropical storms even if there’s a lot of energy from the ocean feeding the storms. The Coriolis effect is not going to change as the planet warms.
As a coastal southerner we don’t get tropical activity until late summer typically. We’ve had Thanksgiving hurricanes/tropical storms.
What’s weird is we’ve had a mild summer so far while everybody else is cooking. We didn’t turn our air on until the end of June!! We always turn it on in the early spring. Mind you it was only ever mid-80s at the most and it cooled off a lot at night. Last week it was 50 degrees one night. Still unsettling.
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