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?