Weatherbell.com forecast
WeatherBELL is a private forecasting company, and they just released their hurricane forecast for this summer’s hurricane season. What sticks out to me is how many named storms they are predicting and how many are major hurricanes. You can also see last year and how this compares to average. The thinking is this season will be like the seasons of 2005, 2007 and 2020.
2005 - 29 storms, 15 hurricanes, more than 3,000 deaths and nearly $160 billion in damages.
2007 - While only 15 storms formed this year, the track of the storms is what WeatherBELL is seeing and concerning for 2024.
2020 - Record breaking 30 named storms with 11 landfalls.
Big impacts this year
WeatherBELL is concerned with the coastlines from Charleston, South Carolina to Brownsville, Texas. Mexico, as well as the Caribbean Islands and Windward Islands are all under threat this year. What is more concerning is the ACE, accumulated cyclone energy. This is how strong the storms that form will be. Two to 3 times the average is how often ACE is predicting the storms that form will be strong!
One of the reasons WeatherBELL is seeing an incredibly active year is the transition from El Nino to La Nina. La Nina summers favor a more active hurricane season. There are several other factors to their forecast but because they are a private company the rest of their information is behind a paywall.
From Frank Billingsley
Wednesday on Frank’s Weather or Not Blog he wrote, An early hurricane heads-up for Houston and Texas.
What was fascinating to me was how much this matched the impact map from WeatherBELL. For 20 years, engineer Dale Link has put out a landfall map and last year was a very good forecast. Here is the link.
What do we do with this information
The important thing to keep in mind even if there are 30 storms that form and we have 8 major hurricanes, it doesn’t mean we’ll get hit in Houston. But like any hurricane season we should be prepared. It only takes one storm to turn your life upside down. I would suggest evaluating your home insurance and flood insurance policies and making sure no matter what happens, your home is covered.
A final note
The WeatherBELL forecast is created by Joe Bastardi. He is a close friend of mine. When I started at KPRC 2 in 2003, he worked at Accuweather. We had a partnership with them, and Joe and I had many conversations about why storms would do what they were going to do. He is also an excellent long-range forecaster.