Hurricane Season Likely To Be Worse Than Expected: CSU

MIAMI, FL — With the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season only a few days old, forecasters at the University of Colorado released a revised seasonal outlook Thursday that predicts the season is likely to be worse than expected.

"The CSU Tropical Meteorology Project team is predicting 19 named storms in 2020, including the three named storms that have already formed," researchers announced, referring to Arthur, Bertha and Cristobal.

"Of those, researchers expect nine to become hurricanes, and four to reach major hurricane strength," university forecasters said.

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That is at the far end of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction of 13 to 19 named storms with sustained winds of at least 39 mph (tropical storms).

Of those, six to 10 are expected to become hurricanes with sustained winds of at least Category 1 strength, including three to six major hurricanes of Category 3 and above with sustained winds of at least 111 mph, NOAA predicted with 70 percent certainty.

Michael Brennan, who is the branch chief of the Hurricane Specialist Unit at the National Hurricane Center, told Patch earlier this week that two of the most important factors in determining whether a particular hurricane season is average or above average depend on the meteorological conditions known as El Nino and La Nina in the eastern Pacific.

Related:

• Cristobal Downgraded; May Still Produce Tropical Storm Winds
• 2020 Hurricane Season Brings Uncertainty, Sleepless Nights
• 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season List Of Names

"Right now we're sort of in between El Nino and La Nina, but we may be trending toward a La Nina pattern by later in the season, which would sort of make the background conditions even more favorable for storms to form in the Atlantic," Brennan said. "If we're going to realize sort of the high end of those ranges of the named storms — the hurricanes and major hurricanes — we'll probably be trending toward a La Nina type pattern by the peak of the season."

In April, Colorado weather researchers predicted there would be 16 named storms, including eight hurricanes, of which four would be deemed major hurricanes.

This year marks the 37th the CSU hurricane research team has issued an Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecast after being launched in 1984 by Bill Gray, who continued to author the forecasts until he died in 2016.

So far, the 2020 hurricane season is exhibiting characteristics similar to 1995, 2003, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2016, the Colorado hurricane research team said.

“Five of these six seasons had above-average Atlantic hurricane activity, while 2013 was an extremely quiet season,” according to Phil Klotzbach, research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU, who served as the lead author of the report.

CSU forecasters said they expect the 2020 hurricane activity to be about 150 percent of the average season. The 2019 hurricane activity was about 120 percent of the average season.

The 2019 season produced Hurricane Dorian, which brought devastation to the northwestern Bahamas, and for Tropical Storm Imelda, which caused flooding in portions of southeast Texas.
The CSU team will update its hurricane season forecast again on July 7 and Aug. 6.