10-year record as hurricane season ends with no Florida landfalls
November 27, 2015 | Filed in: Uncategorized.
Kimberly Miller @kmillerweather
In the spring of 2015, the global atmospheric force El Nino began mustering a strength so formidable that one scientist likened it to Godzilla.
The meteorological event, one of the most potent on record, raged through hurricane season to dissolve burgeoning storms with the efficiency of the campy monster’s atomic breath.
And with storm season whimpering to an end Monday, 2015 marks an unprecedented 10 years since a hurricane has hit the Sunshine State.
But the lack of landfalls this year doesn’t mean there weren’t surprises, and a few tense moments.
Tropical Storm Ana popped up May 8 nearly a month before hurricane season’s official June 1 start date. August’s Hurricane Fred was the first hurricane to hit the Cape Verde Islands since
1892. Tropical Storm Erika drove some South Florida residents to batten down the hatches and board up the windows when it was forecast to be a Category 1 with a bullseye on Palm Beach
County. Florida declared a state of emergency in preparation for Erika, but the August storm never reached hurricane strength, sputtering to its death over the mountains of Cuba.
“This was a below average season, but not astonishingly below,” said Tim Hall, a hurricane researcher and senior scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “It’s just that the storms didn’t make a U.S. landfall.”
In all, there were 11 named storms in the Atlantic this season, four of which became hurricanes.
The strongest, Hurricane Joaquin, was the 10th named storm. It formed Sept. 27 hundreds of miles southwest of Bermuda, and wasn’t given much chance of developing into a major threat.
But Joaquin defied forecasts, quickly accelerating to a Category 4 hurricane with 155 mph winds
– 1 mph shy of a Cat 5 storm. It raked the southern Bahamas and is blamed for the deaths of 33 people who were aboard a cargo ship that sank en route to Puerto Rico from Jacksonville.
“I’m sure there will be a lot of studies about what was missed with Joaquin and why it ramped up so much,” Klotzbach said. “There was just this little pocket that Joaquin found that was a friendly environment and it stayed there.”
The official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2015 hurricane forecast called for a 90 percent chance of a below-average hurricane season. Its August predictions were for 6 to
10 named storms, 1-4 hurricanes and 0-1 major hurricanes.
The average hurricane season has 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
While the sheer number of named storms in 2015 was more than originally forecast, the 4 hurricanes were within the predicted amounts. But forecasters didn’t expect 2 major hurricanes. Besides Joaquin, tiny hurricane Danny in August proved to be a wily cyclone with an unexpected punch. It reached Category 3 strength before weakening to a tropical storm 520 miles east southeast of the Leeward Islands.
“In terms of counts, it’s been really close to an average season,” said Hugh Willoughby, a research professor at Florida International University and a retired 27-year veteran of the NOAA hurricane division. “But what really counts is ACE.”
ACE, or accumulated cyclone energy, is a measure of a hurricane’s strength and duration.
The ACE for 2015 was about 65 percent of the median between 1981 and 2010, and nearly half of that energy was generated by one storm _ Joaquin.
That means while Mother Nature was able to boil up a respectable number of storms, El Nino cut them down before they could gain much ground.
The 2015 Atlantic hurricane season included 11 named storms and four hurricanes.
Tropical Storm Ana, May 8-11, top wind 46 mph
Tropical Storm Bill, June 16-20, top wind 57 mph
Tropical Storm Claudette, July 13-14, top wind 52 mph
Hurricane Danny, Aug. 18-24, top wind 115 mph
Tropical Storm Erika, Aug. 25-29, top wind 52 mph
Hurricane Fred, Aug. 30-Sept. 6, top wind 86 mph
Tropical Storm Grace, Sept. 5-9, top wind 51 mph
Tropical Storm Henri, Sept. 9-11, top wind 40 mph
Tropical Storm Ida, Sept. 18-27, top wind 50 mph
Hurricane Joaquin, Sept. 28-Oct. 8, top wind 155 mph
Hurricane Kate, Nov. 9-12, top wind 75 mph
Source: Unisys Weather, National Hurricane Center