Storms? What Storms?

A week ago it appeared that a whole slew of tropical cyclones were bearing down on the East Coast and the Caribbean.  Now? Eh, not so much!

This is the map of the current tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean, published on the National Hurricane Center's web site last night.  Sam was still a major hurricane, but it's expected to weaken to Category 2 status today, eventually weakening further to a post-tropical storm by Wednesday.  Once thought to hit Newfoundland, it's not going to make landfall anywhere in North America, and it may avoid landfall altogether (though Iceland is not out of the woods yet).  And those two waves that were expected to turn into tropical storms?  One of them became Victor, and it's already weakened to depression status.  The other wave that had a high chance of developing never even became a depression.  Figure that one out! 

There's no guarantee that the Atlantic will remain quiet for the last two months of this hurricane season, though it's more likely than not that it will.  There's a lot of Saharan dust in the air over the ocean, which limits tropical-storm development, and the wind shear over the Atlantic is getting very strong as well.  So I'll be cautiously optimistic and say that the worst of this season is over and that we're likely not to see any more storms before the end of November. But it's still a good idea to keep an eye on the tropics until then.