ORLANDO, Fla. – Today is the last day of our Hurricane Week special, brought to you by News 6.
It’s been a week filled with an abundance of testimonies, education, support, and preparation to hopefully get you that much better equipped to face whatever this upcoming season has in store for us Floridians.
We also hope you can pass down some of this new information to those who may not have had access to it, or who could benefit from the sharing your newfound knowledge as we head into what lies ahead.
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With that being said, the season does officially commence in two more days. Today is Friday, May 30, and after Saturday comes to a close tomorrow, we’ll turn our calendars to June 1.
Experts continue to emphasize they anticipate another above-average season. We’ve hammered this topic home quite a bit over not only this past week, but the last couple of months altogether.
Today, I wanted to share a bit of why it is hurricanes are and will likely remain one of the most challenging but fascinating features that take shape on our planet Earth.
What is a tropical cyclone?
Right away, I want to explain briefly what a tropical cyclone is, down to the most finite detail. What begins as a cluster of very raggedy, disheveled showers and storms eventually can transform into a fast-spinning saw of powerful winds and rain.
A tropical cyclone is an area of low pressure that functions like the internal combustion motor of your car. The warmer waters beneath the clouds and rain that form its center help provide the fuel. The outflow you can see vividly on satellite imagery is the exhaust. Just like when you gas up your car and hit the throttle, these storms essentially behave the same.
The higher octane the fuel (warmer water temperatures), the more horsepower they can handle. The greater these storms can breathe — like the air filter and exhaust on your vehicle — the greater power you generate.
They start out as tropical waves, making their way through Africa as groups of thunderstorms. The tropical easterly jet stream helps push these waves off the western coast and into the Atlantic basin, with this region being called the MDR, or Main Development Region.
From there, if conditions are optimal, they develop even more spin. If things stay in perfect alignment for a feature to get going, they spin faster, deepening the central pressure into a tropical storm and eventually a hurricane.
Hurricanes are ferocious, but they’re also sensitive
You ever have a Sour Patch Kid? Or at the very least seen a commercial? It may sound a little bizarre, trust me, roll with me here, but hurricanes are pretty similar in a few ways. They can be some of the most powerful and destructive forces ever seen around the globe.
But as strong as they can become, they’re VERY sensitive and intricate features.
Take for instance a waiter hustling through their day, tending to multiple tables at a restaurant. As you know, waiters sometimes have to juggle several plates at once. Sometimes they’ll stack them.
Hurricanes are kind of like this stack of plates. The stronger and higher they stack into the atmosphere, the more sensitive they are to changes in their nearby environment. Things like dry air and vertical wind shear can give a developing tropical system a very bad day.
Let’s take that same stack of plates. If you have two or three of them stacked vertically in the palm of your hand and suddenly lose your balance because they aren’t stacked up too high, you may be able to save them from shattering all over the floor below you. Imagine that you losing your balance or being shaken back and forth while trying to balance them is wind shear.
Now, add five or six more plates to your stack and shake around again and again. I’ll bet the first three or four, or maybe the whole stack fall and completely disintegrate. That’s what stronger winds higher in the air do to tropical thunderstorms inside a hurricane. They chop down the cloud tops and the convection like a hair stylist trimming your hair down.
What about dry air?
Central Florida is a great example of what dry or humid, moist air does for our tropical features. This morning, in fact, if you stepped outside even before the sun was up, you probably were smacked by a wave of humidity. Before I even made it to my car I could already feel sweat starting to build on my forehead.
But if it were dry out, like during the winter after a cold front has just passed through, you find it a lot harder to break a sweat sometimes.
The same principle applies for our hurricanes. When there’s more moisture, you get more water, with more water you get more storms, and with more storms, you can develop more powerful hurricanes. This is also why the water inside hurricanes, both from storm surge and the torrential rains they produce, are the most life-threatening.
Now, what makes them so difficult but interesting to forecast?
Let’s start from the big picture. One of the most interesting tidbits you may or may not have known about forecasting for hurricanes is, you could virtually start at a planet-wide scale and work your way down to your local area.
Yes, no kidding. If you wanted to start constructing a hurricane forecast weeks or months before hand, you can start by looking at the entirety of planet Earth. The ocean-atmosphere connection is the primary reason why. What the waters of the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and especially the Atlantic Ocean are doing on an annual basis pay dividends toward a hurricane forecast.
If we have an El Niño in the Pacific, we can expect greater wind shear in the Atlantic. Remember, wind shear chops down hurricanes. El Niño can also weaken pressure features that steer hurricanes. 2023 was the fourth-most-active in history, but we only had one hurricane landfall.
The Indian Ocean Dipole, another oscillation we monitor in meteorology, has two configurations, a positive and a negative phase. During certain phases, the Indian Ocean can actually help tropical development in the Atlantic.
Then we have our MJO, one of the key intra-seasonal variables we have to watch out for throughout the season. If you’re not familiar with the Madden Julian Oscillation, check this story out HERE for some info on that.
The MJO is like the pre-workout you take before you get some exercise. It can help increase favorability for developing tropical systems.
You also have the Bermuda-Azores high pressure, the jet stream that drives our cold and warm fronts over the United States. What goes on over the western United States definitely plays a role in forecasting what a hurricane does in the Atlantic ocean!
Computer models are coming along and evolving rapidly these days to better help us understand how the local environment near a hurricane influences its intensity and track. These computer models, like the Hurricane Analysis Forecast System (HAFS hurricane models), are also dialing in how to better chart and grid the inner processes of the motors inside hurricanes.
We’re working feverishly to better understand and predict rapid intensification. NOAA says, “Every Category 5 hurricane that has made landfall in the US was a tropical storm or less three days prior to landfall.”
I truly hope this article was at least of some benefit to you, toward developing a better understanding as to why not every tropical storm forecast is a slam dunk, why sometimes the forecast can go sideways — even at a moments notice — and how things can go from bad to worse, or from bad to perfect, in the span of a day or even a few hours.
Hurricanes will likely remain the most challenging but interesting storms on Earth to forecast. It’s an honor and a privilege to work as a trusted source for you all as we rock into the 2025 hurricane season as a community.