September 10 is the statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. AccuWeather's Alex DaSilva was live on the AccuWeather Network to discuss the latest on the hurricane season.
00:00Today is the climatological peak of hurricane season. Take a look at the graph here and you can see the numbers back up that statement as when you're looking at the number of storms that have occurred from May 15th to December 8th between the years of 1944 and 2020. That's a large data set there. You can see it peaks when today. Now after today, numbers start to come down. Number of storms come down. But again, this is an average September
00:29and October. Very busy in the hurricane season. Joining us right now is AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex Silva. And you know, Alex, I mean, usually late August, first week or two in September is always a very, very hectic time in the Atlantic Basin, but not this year.
00:52No, not this year at all. And in fact, some years we even have multiple tropical systems out there going on at the same time during this time of the year. But right now, nothing. The Atlantic Basin is completely quiet right now, choked out by a lot of dry air coming across from Africa.
01:07And in fact, if we look at the statistical peak of the hurricane season, which is today, September 10th, only eight years, if we go back since 1950, have there been no named storms in the Atlantic Basin on the statistical peak of the hurricane season.
01:22And sometimes we go, we go decades, decades with what's happening today, not happening. All right. Now, me, you and Brett Anderson were talking about this yesterday.
01:34Why? What's going on here? Well, first of all, here's today. There's really nothing that we're concerned about. That's why we were very confident that there will be no named storms today. A couple of tropical waves, Alex.
01:45But, you know, let's start off with the dry air. And to me, this is quite a bit of dry air for this time of the year.
01:53Yeah, it certainly is. Usually the dry air is really around in June and July. And then usually when we get into especially late August into September, it really starts to starts to wane here.
02:03But you can see how much dry air this there is all this yellow and orange color coming across the Atlantic Basin.
02:09It's just extremely hostile right now. And then on the northern side of this image here, a lot of wind shear up in that area.
02:16And, you know, we were talking about this yesterday. In my mind, there was a lot of wind shear.
02:20But when you look at actually the wind shear product, there's some wind shear.
02:25But, you know, there's that pocket south of 15 degrees north, you know, east of the islands where and even in the parts of the Caribbean, there's no wind shear.
02:35But when I go back, you can see the light purple, no wind shear. But where you have low wind shear, you have the dry air.
02:41Yeah, exactly. You need several ingredients for tropical development, right? You need the warm ocean temperatures.
02:45You need low wind shear and you need a moist environment. And so if you have one or two of those ingredients, but the other one is acting as a detriment, then you probably won't have tropical development.
02:55So like you said, in the areas that we have lower wind shear, we have the dry air. And that's what's really holding things back right now.
03:02All right. Two areas we're going to keep an eye on, Alex, over the next week.
03:06Yeah. One area off the east coast. I don't think this one's going to develop. It's just too hot. It's just too, you know, and it's in an area of hostile winds, basically.
03:15There's winds from the southwest coming to the northeast, and it's just going to rip anything apart, I think, that tries to form there.
03:20Still outlooking it, but the chance is very, very low. The other area we're watching is off of Africa here.
03:25We're going to be watching that African wave train going with all those tropical waves here coming off Africa over the next couple of weeks.
03:31We're going to have to keep an eye out for this one.
03:33But again, if the dry air does not go away, this wave will likely be choked out.
03:37So we're going to have to watch and see.
03:38I do think some of this dry air, though, will begin to decrease as we go to the second half of the month.
03:43And the problem is if things start to decrease with the wind shear and the dry air, you can see that we have a problem in the Atlantic Basin.
03:54Indeed, we do.
03:55We have all this warm water everywhere in orange and yellow indicates water temperatures that are above average for this time of the year.
04:01And the area that we're most concerned with is in the Gulf.
04:04Water temperatures are near 90 degrees in some areas.
04:07You usually look for about 80.
04:08So we're talking about 10 degrees above what is usually necessary for tropical development.
04:13And it's not only about what's at the surface.
04:15It's what lies beneath as well.
04:17Ocean heat content as of yesterday, September 9th, we now have the highest ocean heat content on record ever in the Atlantic Basin in recorded history.
04:27We have officially surpassed 2024 numbers.
04:31And we all remember what happened during the second half of last season.
04:34We had Helene and Milton rapidly intensifying the Gulf.
04:37So that is my concern as we go forward here.
04:39If we see anything able to make it into the Gulf, if there's low wind shear, we're likely going to see rapid intensification.
04:46That's an area we're going to start to look at.
04:48We think during the second half of September here, it still looks like there's a lot of dry air in the tropical Atlantic.
04:56But boy, if you can get a wave to get through the dry air, get through the wind shear,
05:00or you get a dip in the jet stream, a front gets down into the southern Gulf or Caribbean, that would be a problem.
05:07It would indeed.
05:08If we can get that front coming far enough south, we can get some development off of there.
05:11Or maybe it can even activate the gyre.
05:13You can still get systems to form off the gyre.
05:16And in fact, Helene actually was a storm that formed off of a gyre.
05:20So we talk about homegrown development on the bookends of the hurricane season.
05:23But you can still have some in the middle of the hurricane season.
05:27And we're going to have to watch this very carefully.
05:29We don't have specific dates on this area yet, but we're targeting the second half of the month as this area to watch.
05:35AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex Da Silva, thanks for joining us here on AccuWeather Early.
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