Sometimes we just need to laugh. Dealing with the global pandemic over the past year and a half has been tough on all of us. On top of this, the past two Atlantic hurricane seasons (this one is not quite over yet) have been extremely active and have resulted in significant property damage and destruction that has seriously impacted the lives of many people. Unfortunately, there have also been many injuries and fatalities associated with sone of these storms. The forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center have done a great job providing timely and accurate forecast information for the…

We are now well into the 2021 hurricane season and are watching the evolution of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In the past I have used these newsletters to present some information about particularly memorable hurricanes, but this time let’s take a look at a system that, while impactful for some, has not been a historic system by any measure. This system was very slow to develop despite traveling over some rather warm ocean waters at times during the first part of its history. I will examine this system through a series of satellite images with comments…

In the last newsletter I speculated on the possible retirement of hurricane names over the past two Atlantic hurricane seasons. Recall that it is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that generates the lists of names that are used for tropical cyclones around the world, and because of the Covid-19 pandemic, they had been unable to meet after the 2019 hurricane season to decide which names should be retired from the list because the storms were particularly impactful in terms of property damage and/or loss of life. The WMO committee in charge of this task finally met (virtually) in March of…

The 2020 hurricane season was one for the history books. For just the second time in modern times, the list of Atlantic storm names was exhausted, requiring the use of the Greek alphabet. The last time this happened was in 2005, which was the year of Katrina. In that year, storm names extended six deep into the Greek alphabet, with the final storm that year having the name “Zeta”. For the 2020 season, the names went all the way to Iota (the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet). The final storm advisory for the 2020 season was issued on November…