What will come next in this unusual hurricane season?

AccuWeather

Even as a tropical rainstorm slams into the Carolinas, AccuWeather forecasters are looking ahead to where the next tropical system may develop this September.

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00:00On a local scale, some areas like Carolina Beach, specifically in some municipalities,

00:04this was a bigger deal and remains a bigger deal than even Florence was six years ago.

00:10Now we want to take a look at what's going on out there. There's been a kind of an irregular

00:15hurricane season and we're maybe in the bottom of the fifth, top of the sixth inning of this,

00:19if we were to give this a baseball game type analogy. But we want to check in with our

00:26AccuWeather hurricane and tropical forecasting expert, Alex DaSilva. Alex, here we are at the

00:32midpoint of the season and it really has been one that's kind of been offbeat, if you will.

00:38Yeah, it certainly has. The season started out very active. You had Beryl, the earliest category

00:43five hurricane on record across the Atlantic Basin. It was earliest by a whole two weeks,

00:48so certainly very impressive there. It had several storms early in the season and then we had the

00:53mid-summer lull, essentially, right, as we approached the peak of the hurricane season. We

00:57really didn't have a whole lot going on and now over the last week or so, things have begun to

01:01pick up a little bit. And you know, again, September 10th is the statistical peak of the

01:06hurricane season. Now we're starting to kind of go down the roller coaster, but again, September is

01:12typically a very active month and so is October. And it makes me think a little bit about the 2020

01:18year when, in that case, it was the final two storms in November, two of the Greek named storms

01:23that hammered Nicaragua and Honduras. Sometimes these hurricane seasons are not an even bell

01:28curve with the most intense action in the middle. We do have a map that shows where we've been so

01:32far and Gordon is still a named tropical entity, though it's not much of a newsmaker out there.

01:37And again, not every named storm is as impactful as unnamed storms sometimes.

01:43Yeah, certainly not. A lot of times we actually see, you know, unnamed storms,

01:46just like the one we just saw here in the Carolinas, doing a lot of damage there to the

01:50Carolina coastline. Again, it just proves that you don't have to have a named tropical system

01:56to cause significant damage. So it's important for people to not necessarily focus in on,

02:01you know, which category or if it has a name or not, but focus more on what kind of impacts the

02:06storm is going to bring. And we want to take a look ahead as to where we are now and where we

02:11will be. And again, you can see the September 10th peak. So we're just, what, six days after that.

02:16There's a lot of hurricane season ahead of us. So currently you mentioned that it has been an

02:22irregular season, if you will, and regarding kind of some of the headlines that would

02:26characterize where we've been and where we're going. A peculiar hurricane season.

02:30Yes, certainly. It's almost been kind of flipped. You know, early in the season, we typically look

02:34for what we call homegrown development, you know, storms developing very close to the United States

02:39or in the Western Caribbean. But early in the season this year, we saw systems that were more

02:44long tracked coming all the way from Africa, all the way across, you know, like Beryl, you know,

02:48again, category five, you would not expect that to occur that early in the season. Now that we're

02:53in kind of quote unquote the heart of the hurricane season, we've seen a couple of these storms that

02:58have been very close to the United States. So a little bit unusual there, but again, we've seen

03:02several impacts on the United States. So while the numbers haven't been, you know, extreme in

03:07terms of number of storms, we have seen several hits on the United States already. And I think

03:12we could see several more here as we close out the hurricane season. And if we look into the very

03:17short term, Gordon will be a very forgettable storm as it's going to get hooked northward sharply

03:23by some upper level winds. But beyond that, I know that you, Alex, and others here in the long

03:28range forecast side of things have your eyes a little closer to the west, a little farther west,

03:33maybe even a little closer to home as we look into the distant future here. Yes, certainly.

03:38Most people are out here tracking that tropical rainstorm. I'm already starting to look out next

03:43week, right? So next week we're tracking the potential for something else to potentially

03:47threaten the United States. We're going to be looking in the western Caribbean here,

03:51starting on Sunday and then looking forward through next week here. There could be an area

03:56of thunderstorms that develops in the western Caribbean. And then this jet stream to the north

03:59is going to probably pull whatever kind of forms to the north. And so you're going to have plenty

04:04of warm water to work with, lots of moisture. The wind shear, it's not going to be an ideal

04:10environment for a tropical system because, again, you have that dip in the jet stream. So there'll

04:13be low to moderate wind shear. But again, lots and lots of warm water. We're going to have to

04:17watch western Caribbean, eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the southeast coast next week for potential

04:22tropical development. And another case where it kind of resembles more of maybe a July-like storm

04:27here in mid-September. Thanks again for that input and insight. I know it's been a couple of busy

04:33days for you, Alex. Thanks again.

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