Lazaro Aleman, ECB Publishing, Inc.
At the least, north Florida can expect a wet Memorial Day weekend. At worst, the area could be in for a tropical or subtropical storm, a befitting introduction to the Atlantic hurricane season, which officially begins next Friday.
On Wednesday, May 23, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was keeping an eye on a broad surface low that was centered near the coast of northeastern Belize and producing an expansive area of cloudiness and showers that extended from the northwestern Caribbean Sea across Cuba and into the Florida Straits.
“Little development (of the system) is expected during the next couple of days due to strong upper-level winds and
proximity to the Yucatan Peninsula,” the NHC reported on Wednesday. “However, environmental conditions are then forecast to become more conducive for development, and a subtropical or tropical depression could form this weekend over the eastern or central Gulf of Mexico.”
Regardless of the system's development, however, the NHC is predicting heavy rainfall over Florida and the norther Gulf Coast during the weekend, with a 60 percent probability that the system will develop into a depression over the next five days .
Meanwhile, based on last year's hurricane season and an analysis of the impact of the 22 most recent hurricanes, scientists with the National Science Foundation (NSF) are saying that “bigger, stronger and wetter storms” may become the norm. They point to Hurricane Harvey as a possible harbinger. Harvey last year inundated and devastated a large part of Houston, TX.
The NSF's study was conducted under the directorship of Ed Bensman, who is quoted saying that there is every indication that the number of strong hurricanes may be increasing “as a percent of the total hurricanes each year.”
“With increasing development along coastlines, this has important implications for future storm damage,” Bensman is reporting saying.
The 2017 hurricane season was the fifth most active in the U.S. since record keeping began in 1851, accounting for an estimated $215 billion in property damage and the loss of hundreds of lives. And so far, the 2018 season is shaping up to be not much better, according to the Colorado State University (CSU) Tropical Meteorology Project, which released its first outlook of the 2018 season in April.
In its forecast, the CSU predicted 14 named storms this season -- seven of them hurricanes and three of them major hurricanes. The 2018 season, in fact, is expected to be 135 percent higher than the average, compared to the 2017 season, which was 245 percent higher than the average, according to the CSU.
A major hurricane is defined as a Category 3 or stronger on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, meaning that it packs winds of 111 to 129 mph and has the potential to cause significant lost of life and property damage.
The CSU put the probability of a major hurricane striking the Florida peninsula in the 2018 season at 39 percent. It put the probability of a major hurricane striking the Gulf Coast, or the region stretching from the Florida panhandle westward to Brownsville, TX, at 38 percent.
The CSU forecast is traditionally one of the first outlooks of the Atlantic storm season each year. It is based on 30-plus years of statistical predictors, in combination with analyses of other seasons that exhibited similar features of sea-level pressure and sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans. Researchers will develop more detailed outlooks of the season once it begins.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially starts Friday, June 1, and runs through Nov. 30.