The 2013 Hurricane Season

Dr Masters sums up the season that wasn’t:

The end of the unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season of 2013 is at hand. The final tally of thirteen named storms was above the average of eleven for a season, but the two hurricanes (Ingrid and Humberto) and zero major hurricanes were well below the average from 1950 – 2012 of six and three, respectively. The 2013 season ranked as the sixth-least-active Atlantic hurricane season since 1950, in terms of the collective strength and duration of named storms and hurricanes (ACE index), which was just 33% of the 1981 – 2012 average. The 2013 hurricane season was the first time since 1994 no major hurricanes formed, and was only the third below-normal season since the high-activity period for Atlantic hurricanes began in 1995. NOAA and the U.S. Air Force Reserve flew 45 hurricane hunter aircraft reconnaissance missions over the Atlantic basin this season, totaling 435 hours–the fewest number of flight hours since at least 1966, said NOAA in a press release summarizing the 2013 hurricane season.

All of the major players predicted an active season, but the assumptions behind those predictions were wrong. Tropical weather is not acting like it has for decades.

There was a large Saharan Air Layer, dust in the atmosphere picked up over the desert, and consistently high wind shear which hampered development, but the sea surface temperatures were more than warm enough.

Some of it may be because of droughts on land causing large masses of dry air aloft, but things are not working the way they did when the prediction models were developed.

We need more satellites to watch these systems as they are changing their behavior. So far the changes have led to ‘Frankenstorm Sandy’ followed by a nothing season. It would be nice to know what to prepare for as early as possible.