Hurricane Season, Starting Already

Science correspondent Ned Potter blogs: This year’s hurricane season is very unlikely to be as bad as last year’s, but every forecast says it will be active. The National Hurricane Center last week predicted 13 to 16 named storms, of which 8-10 are likely to become full hurricanes. (At left, Tropical Storm Aletta, imaged on Saturday by NASA’s AQUA satellite.) Today there were demonstrators at NOAA in Silver Spring, Md., complaining that the National Hurricane Center staff was playing down the role of global warming in strengthening hurricanes. And there were a few anxious forecasters too — they’ve already had a tropical storm in the Pacific off the Mexican coast. Which reminded me of an interview I did last year at this time with Hugh Willoughby, a veteran forecaster who is now at Florida International University. "This early start is a bad sign we’re likely to be doing this at Thanksgiving," he said then — not knowing the 2005 season would be even longer than that. "Statistically an early start tends to go with an active season." (In addition to NOAA’s forecast, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland does its own research; they’ve posted useful information HERE.)