When forecasters said this hurricane season would be quieter than normal, they weren’t kidding! LSU Health Climatologist Barry Keim says we’re coming up on the middle of September, and we haven’t had one Atlantic hurricane yet – only tropical storms.
“There’s this unit that we call the accumulated cyclone energy index. And even though we’ve had five named storms already, being that they were very short-lived and very weak storms, the total accumulated cyclone energy is extraordinarily low, especially for this point in the season,” Keim explained.
Keim says there are a couple reasons why hurricane season has been exceptionally quiet in the Atlantic this year.
“Clearly, El Niño is the driving force between this quieter-than-normal season. We’ve also had the benefit of some Saharan air that’s floated over here; that tends to knock the number of storms down,” Keim noted.
The record for the latest in the year without a hurricane is September 11th, accomplished in 2002 and 2013; and with no tropical cyclone activity expected in the Atlantic in the next seven days, we will certainly break that record. Keim says there have been years with no recorded hurricanes at all, but those deserve asterisks.
“So you have to go all the way back to 1914 to find a season that has no hurricanes on the books. And even that is kind of dubious, because back in 1914, we barely had aircraft to be able to investigate suspicious areas and we certainly didn’t have satellites back then,” Keim said.
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