![]() “The confidence that we’re not going to have El Niño next hurricane season is pretty high, especially by August or September,” Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University, told CNN.Ī man walks by as another clears snow from a sidewalk Saturday in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. Hurricane experts say it’s too early to know whether so many storms will dodge land next Atlantic hurricane season, but at least one thing is clear for the 2024 season: El Niño isn’t sticking around. “Just that one ingredient (the record-warm water) helped to make for a more active hurricane season, but it also helped to keep that activity away from land,” McNoldy explained.Įl Niño could disappear next hurricane season “When you have a really strong high, storms tend to just keep trekking to the west or to the west-northwest into the Caribbean or through the Bahamas and into Florida or up the East Coast,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, told CNN.īut that wasn’t the case this season, since the high pressure was quite weak due in part to record-high ocean temperatures, according to McNoldy. So, many of the storms that developed out in the tropical Atlantic followed the weakness in the high pressure and turned north, then moved northeast and deeper out to sea. When storms develop in the tropical Atlantic, it’s the strength of the Azores High – a large, semi-permanent area of high pressure in the Atlantic off the northwestern coast of Africa – that acts like a force field, either pushing storms west toward the US or pulling them away toward the open Atlantic. Since the season was able to achieve so much tropical activity despite El Niño’s best efforts to stifle development, it’s remarkable that most of these storms did not impact land. Tracks of named storms in the Atlantic basin in 2023, not including an unnamed subtropical storm from January. ![]() Idalia was the only hurricane to hit the US this year when it slammed Florida as a powerful Category 3 hurricane in August, becoming the strongest storm to strike the state’s Big Bend region in more than 125 years. Three Atlantic storms made landfall in the US: Harold, Idalia and Ophelia. ![]() Fortunately, only a fraction of these storms unleashed their fury on land. Record-high ocean temperatures this season ushered in above-average tropical activity and neutralized the effectiveness of a strengthening El Niño, which typically inhibits storm development in the Atlantic by ripping them apart with hostile upper level winds.īy season’s end, 20 named storms, including seven hurricanes, came to life. The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season ends on Thursday as one of the busiest on record, with a twist: Most of its storms veered into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.īut with El Niño expected to end next year and global temperatures on the rise, forecasters say there’s “high potential” for an even more active hurricane season in 2024 and uncertainty around what that could mean for the United States.
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