A Welcome Hurricane Drought, But How Long Will It Last?

Hurricanes and tropical storms lined up in the 
Atlantic Ocean, September, 2018. It's been a 
slow hurricane season so far, but by next month,
we could well be seeing satellite images
very much like this one. 

 Unlike in recent years, we in the United States and people in the Caribbean have gotten most of the way through this August without a destructive hurricane. 

Which is a very great thing, considering all the other extreme disasters that have befallen parts of the United States and the rest of the world this summer. We've had quite enough trouble with extreme flash floods, drought, wildfires and the like, thank you. 

All the forecasts leading up to hurricane season said we'd have another very busy year in the tropics. And we still might. Right around August 20 is when things normally start to really heat up, as we head toward the peak of hurricane season, which is around September 10 or so.  Big time, bad hurricanes can happen anytime between now and roughly the middle of November.

So far, though, it's been quiet. We had three relatively small tropical storms earlier this year. The biggest, Bonnie, became a hurricane after it completed a rare feat of crossing Central America and winding back up over the Pacific Ocean.

More recently, what would have been Tropical Storm Danielle fizzled yesterday as it failed to get its act together and splashed ashore as disorganized batch of thunderstorms in northeastern Mexico.  The National Hurricane Center is watching another disturbance off the west coast of Africa. It'll take awhile for that one to develop into anything, if it does at all. 

So far, we have gone 320 days without a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. That puts us in the top ten list of longest periods of time with no hurricanes.

This is quite a change from recent Augusts.  In August, 2017 Hurricane Harvey unleashed an unprecedented flood in Houston and other large swaths of Texas. 

August, 2020 was part of the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record, and brought Hurricane Isaias to the East Coast and super-destructive Hurricane Laura to Louisiana.  Last August, Hurricane Ida, as strong as Laura the year before, hit Louisiana, and later unleashed deadly flash floods in and near New York City. 

The 2022 hurricane season up to this point is actually not all that much quieter than normal. By now, we've usually had about four tropical storms or hurricanes. We've had three. Early season storms, the ones that come before about now, are more often than not relatively weak. Almost all major hurricanes have occurred after August 20.

The season has been relatively quiet so far because a lot of dust has been blowing off the Sahara Desert and out into theAtlantic Ocean. That dust tends to squelch hurricanes. It also looks like the Bermuda High, that traditional heat pump, has often been further north than  normal.  

That has allowed that Bermuda High to pull some of the hot, dry air that has been torturing Europe all summer out into the Atlantic Ocean. The dry air can inhibit tropical storms. 

Slow starts to season like this one can easily flip to busy ones, and that's still the prediction for this year. We can look to 1999 as an example. There was pretty much nothing until August 18, then 11 tropical storms, including eight hurricanes formed in the next three months after mid-August. 

One of those 1999 storms, Hurricane Floyd, unleashed a horrible flood in the Carolinas, and here, in Vermont, caused one death, along with some wind and flood damage.   

Yes, we can hope the rest of the 2022 hurricane season is slow, and hope that those predictions for a busy year were just a hot mess. Or if it does get busy, we can pray all the storms curve harmlessly out to sea.

But I wouldn't count on any of that. A lot can happen with hurricanes, especially in the peak season from now into October.