2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

Yes. M is covered every other year for the next millennium.

 

Unimpressed:

 

I'll take the under, please.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/24/noaa-hurricane-forecast-2022/9897576002/

Federal forecasters expect yet another busy Atlantic hurricane season in 2022: As many as 10 hurricanes forming, meteorologists said Tuesday.

The season begins June 1 and runs through Nov. 30. An average season typically spawns seven hurricanes and peaks in August and September. If predictions hold true, it will be a record seventh consecutive year of above-normal activity.

Of the predicted hurricanes, three to six could be major hurricanes, packing wind speeds of 111 mph or higher.

 

NWS was trying to determine if the cold front that came through the Southeast yesterday met the criteria for a tropical depression in the Florida Panhandle. If that's the case, there's about 120 mini-hurricanes disguising themselves as severe thunderstorms in Broward County every summer.

 

I've often said that part of the reason we seem to have more hurricanes and tornadoes these days is because we've simply gotten better at detecting and measuring them. As recently as the late 1930s there were major hurricanes that showed up unannounced on somebody's doorstep. How many others went undetected at sea, or would be classified as weak tropical storms today but were written off as rainy days back then? How can you tell if the 2021 hurricane season was really any better or worse than 1921, 1821 or 1721 when records are incredibly spotty if they exist at all?
There's a very good chance we've had as many storms that are as bad as these for decades and centuries, and what seems to be a foreboding trend is just the normal flow of nature.

 

You aren't wrong. Think about last season. Half of the storms went up the middle of the Atlantic and slammed Bermuda. A hundred years ago we would have never known about them.
That doesn't mean that I don't spend August and September with mixture of fascination and a peach seed up my ass.

 

Hell, until GOES, weather satellites weren't capable of the granularity that we have now. Even so, there seems to be a 50-year dip and rise cycle involved in Atlantic storms -- or at least the data that we have shows one. The 1880s, 1940s and 1990s appear to be the crests, while the 1920s and 1960s-1970s seem to show the ebbs. If that's the case, 2020s would be buying into the dips, as it were.

I know weather folks are trying to correlate El Nino and La Nina factors into hurricane development, but whether (ha!) or not there's a casuality, the plain truth is more and more people have built more and more buildings along dangerous coastlines than ever before. So even if the number of hurricane strikes drop, every one causes that much more damage.

If the 1935 Labor Day hurricane - Wikipedia hit Florida's Bay Area in 2022, it would impact millions instead of thousands.

 

That is another factor, of course — maybe the biggest one. Hurricanes aren't necessarily any worse or more numerous than they've always been. There are just a lot more people in their way now. The same storm that would have come ashore on an unpopulated or lightly populated section of coastline 100 or so years ago would cause insane amounts of property damage today. Miami and Tampa had about 11,000 residents combined in 1910, and now their metropolitan areas have more than 9 million. A Wilma or Michael or Katrina are not considerably stronger than the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane or 1926 Miami Hurricane, they just have more stuff in their path that they can destroy.

Same principle applies to tornadoes. The same tornado that would have swept across open farmland 100 or 150 years ago is now destroying suburbs.

 

Imagine, if you will, living on the Atlantic coast way back in, say, 1870.
No radar, no weather service, nothing. Just big, dark clouds rolling in from the east.

“Say, Ethan, looks like a hell of a storm coming in there over the water. Better get yer boots on!”

And then all hell breaks loose. Utter terror out of nowhere. And maybe in the middle of the night.

 

Galveston in 1900.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane

 

Even more recent, I am 63 and heard the story about my grandmothers laundry, that was of course hanging on a line outside, being ruined by a surprise hurricane. Just looked it up, 1938, she would have been 28.