National, Global Climate Data Not Available Due To Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

The National Centers for Environmental Information
building in Asheville, North Carolina.  The structure and
its physical contents were not damaged in the storm,
but the disaster disrupted the flow of critical national
and global climate data used worldwide.

 Every month, almost like clockwork, I give you updates on how the previous month's United States and global temperatures compared to previous years.  

I do that because most months these days in the age of climate change end up being the warmest on record, or if not, somewhere in the top ten list. It's important to let people know these measures of how climate change is progressing.

These monthly updates are now delayed because of a weather event that was likely made worse by the very climate change all this data was tracking. 

NOAA's  National Centers for Environmental Information, which compiles all this detailed global climate data, is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. It's the world's largest environmental data center. 

As we know, Asheville was brutalized by the flooding from Hurricane Helene. Swaths of the city were inundated or even swept away by floodwaters. Power, internet and water were out for weeks, and still hasn't been fully restored. 

Because of all this, the U.S. September climate report, which was supposed to be released on September 8, and the global climate report, which was supposed to go out October 10, have been delayed and we still have no idea when we'll see these documents. 

That's not good, because these monthly climate reports are not just interesting to geeks like me. Both the private and public sectors use them, including organizations and governments involved in agriculture, energy, retail, reinsurance, transportation and media. 

Thankfully, nobody who works at NCEI was hurt in the disaster. The building itself is intact and computer systems and existing data were not lost.  Old archives on paper and film are also safe. 

The servers at NCEI need a big, powerful cooling system, which relied on Asheville municipal water to get the job done. Hurricane Helene cut off the municipal water supply, and just this week, only some of the first steps toward getting that supply flowing again have started.

NCEI has been scrambling to set up alternative cooling systems. 

As of Thursday, things were beginning to look up.  NCEI takes in a lot of data daily, and they were not able to do that for weeks. Most of the usual data had started coming in as of this week, as broadband internet connections have finally been restored.

However, they have to catch up with data that never arrived during the crisis, and they might never be able to recover some of that data,

I don't know to what extent that might degrade the quality of their climate reports, if at all. 

People use NCEI information and data streams to make the point we need to adapt for climate change, to adjust the way we do things. It appears NCEI will need to do the same.

It's likely too early to plan this out in earnest, but I imagine they will need to find a redundancy, some entity somewhere else that can act as a backup if something like this ever happens in Asheville again. 

Interestingly, according to WUNC, NCEI was relocated from New Orleans to Asheville in the 1950s. Asheville was chosen because it was closer to Washington DC and because it was thought to be a historically safe climate area,

So much for that idea.  

Hurricane Beryl Not Going Down Without A Fight

Satellite view of Hurricane Beryl shows it looking
much less organized and symmetrical than 
yesterday as strong upper level winds 
disrupt it, but it's still managing to hold on
as a powerful, dangerous storm. 

 As of this afternoon, Jamaica is the latest island to be trashed by extreme, intense oddball Hurricane Beryl as the storm gets ready to hit, or at least make a close pass at that nation.  

Despite more than 24 hours of a hostile upper atmosphere, Hurricane Beryl still had maximum sustained winds of 140  mph as of late this afternoon.

 The storm still has the Cayman Islands, Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Belize and possibly southern Texas in its sights. 

Hurricanes don't like strong upper level winds. Those winds disrupt the nice round circulation of tall powerful thunderstorms that make up the ring of scary weather around the storm's eye.

When those upper level winds - known as shear - hit a hurricane they almost always weaken. 

Such is the case with Beryl, but the process has been stubbornly slow.  It's amazing that after 24 hours of westerly upper level winds, the central winds were still that 140 mph late this afternoon, down from its peak of 165 mph yesterday.  

If anything, Beryl actually looked more organized late this afternoon than it did this morning, which is definitely unexpected. 

Beryl has consistently kept meteorologists surprised, mostly because of its early season intensity, its development in an area of the Atlantic where hurricanes aren't "supposed" to develop until August, and now Beryl's reluctance to weaken in an atmosphere where it should be having some trouble. 

That slow pace of diminishing is why Jamaica is taking such a hit. The hurricane hadn't made its closest approach to Jamaica this afternoon and Kingston has already reported sustained winds of 48 mph with gusts to 81 mph, says the National Hurricane Center. 

Ferocious  winds will destroy tons of buildings in Jamaica, especially near the south coast. Torrential rains in Jamaica's steep mountains will cause violent flash floods and mudslides - they've probably started already as I write this at midafternoon eastern time. 

The destruction left behind is still being assessed in places like Grenada, where Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said destruction on the nation's island of Carriacou is "almost Armageddon-like.

Drone video taken over Carriacou makes the entire island look like it was put into a giant blender. Pulverized pieces of houses were everywhere. Most buildings lost parts or all of their roofs. 

Per CBS News: 

"'Almost total damage or destruction of all buildings, whether they be public buildings, homes or other private facilities,' Mitchell said. 'Complete devastation and destruction of agriculture. Complete and total destruction of the natural environment. There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou.

Carriacou, which means 'Isle of Reefs' is just 13 square miles, but is is the second-largest island within Grenada. Beryl's size and strength completely overpowered the island, as well as its neighbor, St. Vincent and the Grenadines' Union Island, which saw 90 percent of its homes severely damaged or destroyed.

Clare Nullis, a spokesperson for the World Meteorological Organization, said earlier this week that 'it takes only one landfalling hurricane to set back decades of development.'"

With climate change increasing the risks of super hurricanes like Beryl, that of course is bad news. Island nations are a dime a dozen in and near the Caribbean. 

There's been a slew of big hurricanes in recent years, and there's no reason to think it will stop this year. Most experts say the rest of this hurricane season will be extraordinarily busy. Hurricane Beryl suggests these forecasts might end up being right. 

After today, Beryl will continue its weakening trend, but will probably still be a hurricane by the time it reaches the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico by Friday morning. 

Time spent over land in Mexico will ensure Beryl weakens to a tropical storm. But meteorologists with the National Hurricane Center worry Beryl will get a new lease on life when it emerges over the warm waters of the southwestern Gulf of Mexico on Saturday.

It could strengthen into a hurricane again before hitting northeast Mexico or southern Texas by around Sunday or Monday.  Forecasts trends have been shifting the expected path of Beryl northward.  Earlier forecasts indicated it will make landfall again well south of Texas

Now, forecasts vary, but it could come ashore somewhere within spitting distance either side of the Mexico/Texas border.

 

Media, Including Me, Recently Wrongly Ignored A Cataclysmic Climate Calamity

Destruction in Libya after last month's extreme flood,
made worse by both climate change and political
instability. This will happen again and again, unfortunately. 

Severe, record floods have been all over the new recently, as climate change has contributed to some epic inundations around the world.  

Yes, heat has been in the news for months, and so have floods. I can point to Vermont a few months ago, where we got tons of media attention for our horrible floods. 

Meanwhile, how many of you have heard details of the big flood last month in Libya? Sure, it's been in the news, sort of, but that calamity has not been a headline grabber. I also haven't touched this story, which is actually a shame. 

Two or three people died in Vermont's floods. Which is undeniably horrible. 

Over in Libya, the death toll was around 20,000, making it among the worst floods in modern history.  At least another 40,000 people have been displaced by the flood, just in the city of Derna. It pretty much got passing notice in the media. Can you imagine the uproar if God forbid a flood killed 20,000 people in the United States?

The Libya calamity was important, and we should have covered it more for this among other reasons: 

It was a classic example of how climate change teams up with humans' propensity for evil, corruption and incompetence to really mess things up. 

The storm that caused the flood, Storm Daniel, was turbo-charged by climate change. It formed over the Mediterranean Sea in September, and took on some tropical characteristics because of the record warm water temperatures out there. 

This along with the fact warmer air can hold more moisture than chillier air, helped Storm Daniel unleash incredible amounts of rain on Libya and elsewhere. It's another example of what climate change can do. 

On top of that, Libya's so-called government is in shambles.  As the BBC reports:

"Libya has been in political chaos since long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed in 2011 - leaving the oil-rich nation effectively split with an interim, internationally recognized government operating from the capital, Tripoli, and another one in the east."

That other government is in control, as it were, with Derna.  Due to the chaos, Libya had no real system like stable nations to warn the population of the impending danger. 

When the big floods hit us here in Vermont this summer, we had a well-organized government agency, namely the National Weather Service, broadcasting precise, timely warnings.  That prompted people to get out of the way. People fled flood prone areas, based on the warnings they'd received.

Vermont's state government, especially Emergency Management, and well organized local first responders, rescued dozens of people. The national agency, FEMA, swooped in to provide aid. 

In other words, the system more or less worked, and fatalities were kept to a minimum. 

In Libya, had there been a functioning government, what ever their equivalent of the National Weather Service would have issued dire warnings. The government would then order evacuations. Derna would still have been largely destroyed, but perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. 

We've always been really, really bad, corrupt governments with fatal, often genocidal results. I'm not minimizing that. It's just that some humans, anyway, are incredibly cruel and indifferent beyond belief.

So there's a feedback loop between climate change and unstable governments.  It isn't and won't be just Libya. There are plenty of unstable governments one storm away from disarray and dissolution. Additionally climate change can destabilize governments. 

Migrants continue to flow toward Europe and the United States. That migrant flow is contributing to  political and societal divisions in both regions.  Please note I'm not taking sides on this issue here. But however you feel about migrants and immigration, fairly or not, it's causing political strife, discord, and most distressingly, either threats of violence or actual violence. 

Most of the migrants are fleeing crime, corruption, poverty and war. Increasingly, climate change is finding its way into the calculus when migrants decide whether to leave their homeland.

As PBS points out, it's hard to tease out how many are fleeing climate problems, because most migrants flee for more than one reason.  For instance, in El Salvador, crop failures due to climate driven droughts and floods and prompting people to leave. But those same people are also leaving due to gang violence and government corruption. 

So was it climate change, gangs or a bad government that prompted Mr. El Salvadorian to try fleeing to the United States? Probably a combination, but we'll never know. 

Meanwhile, here in Vermont, I'm still seeing bits and pieces of updates on the news regarding recovery from our July floods. I haven't heard a peep about Libya in weeks, it seems. 

Thursday a did a search on Google news "Libya flood." 

I did see one article from BBC published two days earlier titled "Libya floods: The flawed response that increased Derna death toll."

Other than that, there's a Washington Post story from a week ago, and nothing else for over two weeks. That's not to say there wasn't any other news story recently regarding the Libya flood, but you're left to wonder what's going on over there.

Yes, big new events are overshadowing Libya, the biggie being the Israel/Hamas mess and tragedy. 

But the dearth of updates on Libya and other international disasters leaves me thinking the victims are basically on their own with the aftermath. I know there are good international relief agencies trying to help, but there's only so much they can do.  

The Libya flood is definitely out of the headlines, for better or worse. We will just wait, dreading the next climate and human tragedy 

One Year After Hurricane Ian, Southwest Florida Still Struggling Physically, Mentally

Satellite view of catastrophic Hurricane Ian about to 
make landfall in southwest Florida one year ago today. 

 One year ago today, on September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian, just shy of Category 5 strength, slammed into the area around Fort Myers Beach, Florida, killing at least 150 people and becoming the second most expensive United States weather disaster on record. 

I don't mark the anniversary of every hurricane, but Ian was such a monster that I can't avoid it. Thankfully, so far this year, we haven't had a repeat of Ian.  Hurricane Idalia on August 31 in northern Florida was really, really bad, but not at all in the same league as Ian. 

It was the fourth strongest hurricane on record to hit Florida. Two of the  top three hurricanes hit well before the extensive coastal development in Florida ever hit. 

Hurricane Andrew was the most recent of the big three, hitting in 1992. Andrew was incredibly devastating, but the worst of it barely missed super heavy populated Miami. Instead, it destroyed the town of Homestead, Florida, which had a population of 30,000, not hundreds of thousands, like southwestern Florida when Ian hit. 

Recovery has gone in fits and starts, and it will take years before places like Fort Myers Beach, Captiva, Sanibel Island and Pine Island. People whose homes were wrecked are still fighting and in some cases suing insurance companies. 

At least 90 percent of the buildings in Fort Myers Beach were damaged or destroyed. 

Hurricane Ian has of course faded from the headlines, except on this anniversary date. More recent mega-disasters, like the wildfires in Maui last month and the catastrophic floods in Vermont in July, have since came and gone from the headlines

In the months and years after a major disaster, the victims are largely forgotten, but they're still struggling. Fox 13 news in Tampa Bay reported this example, which I think is pretty representative of what people in the Ian region are going through: 

"'My house is still uninhabitable. It has even yet to start repairs because my insurance company won't approve it at all and FEMA did very little to help me. I'm paying an exorbitant amount of rent just to survive. I've lost a year of equity in my home. I'm barely making it. I could be homeless in the future,' said South Venice resident Carrie Smith."

Yes, businesses are gradually reopening, and many residents are moving back into newly repaired homes. But the pace of recovery from disasters like this is glacial. 

This is devastating for mental health. The Tampa Bay Times reports six suicides in the aftermath of Ian. The newspaper also says experts expect more suicides as victims hit one dead end after another, prevent them from moving on from the hurricane. 

I guess this is the most important lesson to take away after a big weather calamities. Let's face it, after a disaster, the people and corporations and governments that are supposed to help serious often let victims down. 

Mental health is a big, scary issue after a disaster. As worrying as the actual physical work of pulling your life back together again. Please, if you know somebody struggling after Vermont's flood this summer, try to help and support them as much as you can. 

Climate change is making these huge disasters more likely and more frequent. Climate change is not only a physical, global and development crisis. It's also a global mental health crisis. 

 

Brazil Mudslide Worst In Series Of South American Weather Disasters

The brown scars on this hillside in Brazil are where
mudslides swept homes and people this week 
in and around the city of Petropolis. 

 Large swaths of South America have had record heat waves, floods and storms this year, and the worst one of all, so far at least, hit this week.  

Massive mudslides amid torrential rains have killed at least 104 people, and that toll is almost guaranteed to rise, unfortunately.

Most of the deaths and destruction were in a touristy Brazilian city called Petropolis, very near Rio De Janeiro. Some videos are near the bottom of this post 

Photos showed huge long brown scars down steep hillsides around Petropolis each of the scars being mudslides that obliterated homes and trees. 

 From CNBC:

"Footage posted on social media showed torrents dragging cars and houses through the streets and water swirling through the city. One video showed two buses sinking into a swollen river as its passengers clambered out the windows, scrambling for safety.  Some didn't make it to the banks and were washed away, out of sight." 

From Washington Post: 

"Emergency responders have rescued 24 people, officials said, and at least 400 have been left homeless. Authorities do not know how many remain missing, and they have called in heavy machinery to help dig through the rubble."

 This part of Brazil is vulnerable to floods and mudslides. A similar disaster in the same region killed about 900 people eleven years ago.

The closing days of 2021 and the start of 2022 have been particularly trying for many parts of South America. 

As the Washington Post points out, landslides in two Brazilian states caused 40 deaths in January. That came just weeks after another flood elsewhere in Brazil killed 21 people.  

In January, Argentina wilted amid record heat.  At the end of January, Ecuador suffered flooding and mudslides that killed at least 24 people and left others missing. 

Videos: If you don't see the video displayed below, click on the hyperlink in each introduction to view. 

Bloomberg collected this footage of hillsides collapsing and rushing water racing between buildings, taking cars and much other debris with it. 

This Brazilian news report captures glimpses of how extreme these floods and mudslides were:

This next one is terrifying, distressing and sad.  People trying to escape from two sinking buses. It doesn't look like everyone made it:

Typhoon Kills At Least 375 in Philippines.

Satellite view of Typhoon Rai striking the Philippines 
late last week. The death toll continues to ris. 

 Typhoon Rai, as it was known, caused a little-reported but still very deadly disaster in the Philippines over the past few days. 

According to the ABC News:

"The death toll from the strongest typhoon to battle the Philippines this year climbed to 375 with more than 50 others still missing and several central provinces struggling with downed communications and power outages and pleading for food and water." 

This disaster seems to have flown under the media radar, as I haven't seen a whole lot of news covering this.  The death toll in the Philippines is nearly four times that of the toll from the awful tornadoes in and near Kentucky earlier this month. 

Typhoons are common in the Philippines. As many as 20 of them can strike the nation in a single year. However, as you can tell, this one  was worse than usual. When it was at top strength, Typhoon Rai's winds were at 121 mph, gusting to 168. 

The death toll would have been much higher, but thousands of people were evacuated from coastal areas ahead of the approaching storm.  About 700,000 people were in the path of the storm's worst effects. 

After leaving the Philippines, the typhoon neared Vietnam, but steered away from that nation, sparing it the worst effects. It has since dissipated northeast of Vietnam. 

Videos. As usual click on the hyperlinks if the video isn't viewable in the post.

Washington Post has this video of the typhoon: 

I'm struck by stunning natural beauty of the area of the Philippines hit by this typhoon juxtaposed with the extreme destruction in this Al Jazeera report: 

 

 

California Dreaming: Early, Welcome Start To Wet Season Out There

Predictions call for more then ten inches
of rain in parts of northern  California
over the next seven days.

The headlines regarding California's drought have been growing ever more dire, and I see little prospect of improvement. 

Except.  

Storminess is moving in that will if nothing else raise Californians' spirit, and even end the wildfire season in the northern parts of the state.

Some of the most devastating and deadly northern Californian fires have hit in late October and November in recent years. For instance the fire that all but destroyed the northern California city of Paradise and killed 85 people was in November, 2018.  

This year, the first heavy rains are moving in during mid-October. The drenching should suppress any ongoing fires and prevent new ones. 

Forecasts for the next week call for up to ten inches of rain in some sections of northern California.  Most areas from the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento could easily see three or more inches of rain by next Tuesday.

Several feet of snow could fall on the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada.

This would effectively end the fire season in that part of wildfire and drought plagued California. 

Even areas between the Los Angeles area and San Diego could see a half inch or more of rain out of this by early next week.  

One big autumn storm will not solve California's serious water crises. The state's "water year" runs from October 1 through September 30.  The one that just ended on September 30 of this year was California's driest since 1924. 

Big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento had less than half the rain they should have during the 12 months ending on September 30.

As previously reported, reservoirs like Lake Mead are at dangerously low levels and would probably need a string of wet winters to fully recover. 

Still, this early taste of water from an expected atmospheric river off the Pacific Ocean puts Californians in a good frame of mind.  If the weather pattern persists through the winter - a very, very iffy proposition - then Californians can relax just a bit next spring. They'd still probably be in drought, but not as bad as the conditions they have now.

The only drawback to the heavy northern California rains over the next week is a legacy of the intense drought they've had.  Wide areas of the landscape are burned over by wildfires from this year, and recent years.

With the vegetation burned away, soils are no longer held in place. There will be flash flooding and debris flows and mud slides coming up.

Since southern California is just getting a glancing blow from these wet weather systems, the intense drought will hold firm there, despite the brief wetting. 

In fact, there's still time after this rain for things to dry out again.  Fire season isn't over in southern California if drying, strong Santa Ana winds develop as they often do in the late autumn and early winter.

Crunch Time In Western Drought: A Permanent Drought Could Become A Permanent National Crisis

"Bathtub Ring" in Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam shows how
low the water is, and how high it should be. If this keeps up
for a few more years, we have a national crisis.

 Here in Vermont, the drought we were enduring this spring and early summer is nearly gone. Northern areas still need quite a bit of rain, but at least it's better.  

Not much rain is in the forecast, but there is hope that autumn storms will come along and wet us down further. Our drought in northern Vermont is not the biggest possible crisis.  

Out west, meanwhile, the situation is turning more dire.  You might have heard about those wonderful monsoon thunderstorms that created some flash floods in the Southwest this summer.  That might have led some people to believe the drought is ending out there, too.

Not a chance.  The summer thunderstorms lessened, but did not eliminate the drought in a few sections of Arizona.  But most of the heavy rain consisted of local downpours that swept down mountain slopes and canyons but didn't create any widespread wetting.  The storms were a drop in the bucket. 

Extreme drought lives on.  The only hope for relief comes this winter.  Normally, large storms crank through the West over the colder months, causing widespread rain and mountain snow.  They'll need many, many such storms this winter to ease this long lasting drought.  One wet winter will not be nearly enough to solve the problem. You'll need a string of them. 

For what it's worth, long range seasonal outlooks from NOAA paint a grim picture in the Southwest. They call for persistent dry weather all winter out there. Worse, the forecasts call for above normal temperatures, which increase evaporation and can make droughts even more dire.

Granted, long range forecasts months in advance can easily be inaccurate, but the early thinking is bad.

Until now, real people have not been super affected by this southwestern drought, but that's changing. 

When Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, is totally full, the water is 1,225 feet deep. Now, it's down to 1,075 feet or even a little lower than that.  That means conservation orders are in effect in parts of Arizona and farmers are now starting to have to let fields go fallow for lack of irrigation.

That's bad enough. But if this slow-motion disaster goes on for a few more years, it turns into a national crisis.

The drought that is making Lakes Mead and Powell so low was not just a one or two year affair, like the relatively minor drought we've had in Vermont.

The western drought has been building for a decade or more.  Climate change might well have permanently made the West hotter and drier than it once was.  So the winter rains could very well continue to fail indefinitely.

Experts are saying that climate change is making the weather more extreme. You might get a brief super wet period in which torrential rains hit the West, causing some serious flooding and briefly interrupting the slow decline of western reservoirs. 

But if climate scientists are right, we'll have to stop wondering if the explosive population growth over the past several decades in the Southwest was really such a good idea.

According to the Arizona Republic, there's a 41 percent chance Lake Mead water will be so low by 2025 that big cities like Phoenix could see sharply curtailed water supplies. And, if current projections hold, there's a one in five chance that by 2025, Hoover Dam, which holds back Lake Mead, will have to stop producing hydropower.

If that happens, electricity for 1.3 million people gets cut off.  Upstream Lake Powell might have to shut off the electric turbines due to low water by 2023.  There goes another source of electricity for 1.5 million people. 

The shortages of water and electricity at the very least could make life more difficult for millions of people. Some might become "climate refugees,"  leaving the Southwest for wetter, more hospitable parts of the United States.

This is a sign that the crap is hitting the fan with climate change. You can imagine the social and political upheaval if western drought causes large scale population shifts and migrations. This would affect us all, so the western drought is not just "their problem."

Remember, one study I wrote about recently suggested Vermont is one of the so-called "safer" places as climate change takes hold.  Will we get an influx of climate refugees?

Sure, with labor shortages and and aging population, a small surge of young, industrious people to the Green Mountain State would probably be a good thing overall.  But what if we see thousands upon thousands of people moving here at once?

This won't happen immediately, of course. It'll be a generational thing.  But great minds will have to plan for both what to do to confront the likely permanent drought in the Southwest. And they''ll have to figure out what to do about the widespread societal impacts that the drought and other effects of disastrous climate change might bring. 

We are obviously an already deeply divided nation.  We've divvied ourselves into mutually hostile tribes. That's not a recipe for cooperation.

We failed as a nation handling the pandemic, as we resorted to political hackery and profiteering, with deadly results. So what are the chances we'll get our act together and figure out as one nation how to confront the societal effects of climate change? Societal effects that might make the pandemic seem like a blip on the radar?

I'm not optimistic.

Waiting For The Terrible News After Hurricane Iota Strikes Nicaragua

Hurricane Iota as a Category 5 yesterday bearing 
down on Nicaragua

 Hurricane Iota slammed into Nicaragua last night with sustained winds of 155 mph, with surely devastating results.  

It had "weakened" from top wind Category 5 wind speeds of 160 mph while the storm was just offshore, but of course that 5 mph decline made absolutely no difference in the devastation. 

Hurricane Iota came ashore just 15 miles from where Category 4 Hurricane Eta hit two weeks ago. Which means the same area was devastated by Category 4 hurricanes in the same month.  The trauma for the people who live in that area must be just awful. 

We don't have details of what exactly is happening in that storm, as it's still raging. Hurricane Iota is smacking into the mountainous terrain in Nicaragua, which means its winds will die down very quickly and mercifully today.

But Iota has to rain itself out in these mountains, already super saturated by Eta.  As a result, the flash flooding and mud slides will be immense, with up to 30 inches of rain expected.

The only saving grace with Iota is it will die over the Nicaraguan mountains.  That's in contrast to Hurricane Eta, which bounced off the mountains back into the southern Gulf of Mexico. Eta then went on to cause extensive flooding days later in Cuba and Florida. 

Not happening this time. 

There's some weird stuff going on with this year's hurricane season. This is the busiest one on record, as we've already established, with 30 named storms.  Believe it or not, there's a chance of another tropical storm next week in the western Caribbean Sea. 

Hurricane Iota was the strongest hurricane of the 2020 season. That's especially strange since the strongest hurricane of any season (usually, but not always) hits near the peak of the season in late August or September. 

Like several hurricanes this season - such as Laura, Delta and Eta - Iota strengthened very rapidly from not much to a monster in a matter of a day or two.  In fact, looking at records that date back roughly a century,  three of the 11 hurricanes in the Atlantic that have strengthened the quickest have occurred in the past month. (That's Delta, Eta and Iota).

Iota was also obviously the strongest November hurricane to strike Nicaragua. The previous record was set by Hurricane Eta a couple weeks ago. 

Many factors contributed to this year's busy and tragic hurricane season.  One important factor was high sea surface temperatures. Those warm waters were made toastier in part due to climate change, so there's certainly evidence that climate change might have made this year's hurricane death and damage toll worse than it otherwise would have been.