Atlantic hurricane seasons are running ahead of schedule - The Verge

Atlantic hurricane seasons are arriving earlier in the year than they used to. Storms are developing ahead of schedule as oceans warm.

Hurricane season in the Atlantic is arriving ahead of schedule as the oceans warm, a new study finds. Big storms in the North Atlantic are forming earlier in the year than they used to, and forecasters say this means coastal communities need to be on the alert sooner, too.

Tropical storms that reach a certain strength are named by the World Meteorological Organization. And the first named storms to develop each year have come about five days earlier each decade since 1979, according to the study published today in the journal Nature Communications. Named storms that make landfall in the US, meanwhile, have shown up about two days earlier every decade since 1900.

That means communities that frequently find themselves in the path of those storms might need to prepare for hurricane season earlier than they have in the past. And officials might want to rethink the timeframe they’ve established for the Atlantic hurricane season, which has officially started on June 1st every year since 1965.

“As a hurricane forecaster, in the late 20-teens, I noticed that there’s a very unusual preponderance of storms developing before the start of hurricane season,” says Ryan Truchelut, lead author of the new study. Truchelut co-authored the paper and co-founded the forecasting company WeatherTiger with his wife, physicist Erica Staehling.

The authors of the new study based their research on storm development on observational data from 1979 to 2020. They were limited to studying those four decades because that’s about how long satellites have been around to help forecasters see more storms develop. They felt that including earlier years might have led to a biased assessment of seasonal trends over time.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/16/23307081/atlantic-hurricane-season-storms-arrive-early

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