Hurricane Alley Revisited

Remember how active last year's Atlantic hurricane season was?  Well, get used to it.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just raised the bar for more seasons like last year's - starting with this year's.  

The NOAA has now declared that an average Atlantic hurricane season should be expected to have fourteen named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes - more than the previous numbers for an average season.  To add insult to injury, the meteorological department of Colorado State University is calling for seventeen named storms, eight hurricanes, and four major hurricanes in the Atlantic basin for 2021. (The NOAA's forecast for the season comes out later in the year.)  That may be a lot less than the number of storms we got in 2020, but that's still comparable to a typically active season in years past - the 2012 season had nineteen named storms overall, with ten hurricanes and two major hurricanes, and one of those storms was Sandy.   And no, I haven't forgotten that the almanacs are calling for a hurricane threat for the Northeast in early August - a year after Isaias hit.

Thank climate change for all of this fluctuation, and while storms won't necessarily become more frequent, they will become more deadly, in which case, if you live in the New York Tri-State area, you can probably kiss Jones Beach, Fire Island, and Long Beach Island goodbye.

Who needs a pandemic to make life on earth a living hell? 

Updated Weather Report

As you have already gathered, Hurricane Dorian had no impact on New Jersey, but it did have an impact on Nova Scotia.  But nowhere did it have a greater impact than in the Bahamas, where it's created a humanitarian tragedy that is the worst crisis in the country's 46 years of independence.  And yet Donald Trump is all obsessed about trying to explain why he thought Dorian would hit Alabama - and used a Sharpie on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map to include the state in the cone of uncertainty.  But what was certain about Dorian is that Alabama wouldn't be affected. 

So while Trump's government denies asylum seekers staying in the Bahamas the opportunity to come here after Dorian made much of the Bahamas uninhabitable, Trump's Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, threatened to fire NOAA staffers in Alabama for contradicting a Trump statement that Trump can't admit was a mistake.

Well, he'd better stop obsessing over the last storm and start obsessing over the next one - a tropical depression that's expected to become Tropical Storm Humberto.  Not only will it go over the Bahamas, it will move over Florida and possibly part of Georgia.

Alabama will be fine.