2006 shaping up to be a very bad hurricane season

This is your jump on official hurricane forecasters: 2006 has all the makings of a very bad hurricane season.

The reason? Warmer ocean surface temperatures that fuel the giant swirls of destruction. And this year, we are seeing a very unusual lack of cold fronts carrying down into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea to take a portion of that temperature off the water.

And for the record, this effect didn’t just start in the last year or two.

A new study published in the journal Science documents this progressive warming of the ocean’s surface. A synopsis of the study appears on the web site LiveScience.com.

In an article by Ker Than, a LiveScience staff writer, “A rise in the world's sea surface temperatures was the primary contributor to the formation of stronger hurricanes since 1970, a new study reports . . .

“In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year . . .

“Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.

“While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.”

How does this play out for us in 2006?

Robert Roy Britt, managing editor of LiveScience, reviewed this year’s predictions by Dr. Bill Gray, long known as a guru of hurricane forecasting.

Britt wrote that the prediction calls for:

17 named tropical storms; an average season has 9.6.
9 hurricanes compared to the average of 5.9.
5 major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph; average is 2.3.

He continued that, “The current series of busy seasons is part of a long-term cycle that climatologists had predicted years ago. The Atlantic is in its 11th year of heightened activity. It is expected to ‘continue for the next decade or perhaps longer,’ said officials with the National Weather Service last week.”

According to LiveScience, “In 2005, nature dished out more storms than anyone expected, and new records were set for the most storms, the most intense one ever, and the most destructive.”

Last year, we saw 3 of the top 6 most intense hurricanes occur. Wilma was so powerful, it nearly broke through the mathematical ceiling for a Category 5 hurricane, raising questions in scientists’ minds about the need or a new Category 6 level.

In the past, the theoretical wind speed limit to an Atlantic Ocean hurricane was 175 mph. But this year, with the new numbers coming in from the ocean surface temperature studies, 190 mph is the new theoretical limit.

Does it really matter? Is there a point at which the destruction is the same at either wind speed?

In an interview published in National Weather Log, put out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the two men credited with creating the Saffir-Simpson Scale of measuring hurricanes, former National Hurricane Center director Robert Simpson, gave it this perspective: "If that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it's going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it's engineered. So I think that it's immaterial what will happen with winds stronger than 156 miles per hour."

Let’s hope that nobody along America’s coastlines has to find out if that is true in 2006.
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