00:00Joining us right now is AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva.
00:04And Alex, it was back in March that we issued our hurricane forecast and we were talking about El Nino.
00:11How quickly would it strengthen? How strong will it strengthen?
00:15Well, we have the answers and that has caused us to update our hurricane forecast.
00:22Yeah, we're always trying to give people the best forecast possible and using the latest data that we have.
00:27And so we have modified our forecast a little bit, given that trend for a quicker El Nino start here.
00:33So we dropped our numbers. Our original numbers for number of named storms was 11 to 16.
00:38And we have decreased those now to 8 to 14 total named storms.
00:43That is the only thing that we have changed from our forecast that we originally issued back in March.
00:48You can see we've seen one named storm so far this year and one direct impact to the United States.
00:53That, of course, was Arthur. And we're still forecasting another two to four direct impacts for the U.S. this
00:59year.
00:59When we talk about El Nino, we're talking about the sea surface temperatures along the equator in the western part
01:08of the Pacific.
01:09And that's where we're starting to see the El Nino take shape. Explain, Alex.
01:14Yeah, you can see all the yellow and all the orange in this area. That indicates warmer than average sea
01:19surface temperatures.
01:19So we are in an El Nino now. And in fact, we give it about a 70 percent chance that
01:24we could enter a super El Nino by the end of the hurricane season.
01:27That's only happened once since the year 2000. So a pretty rare event there.
01:32And then what does that do for the tropical Atlantic?
01:34Well, it usually yields less storms overall because we usually have more hostile winds that come down and can disrupt
01:40tropical systems.
01:41So El Nino's typically yield the less active hurricane seasons.
01:46Boy, look at all the dry air, Alex, in the Atlantic right now.
01:49You can see that on the water vapor loop with the yellow and also the wind shear.
01:54So we're not expecting anything in the next week or so.
01:58But you have your eye on something middle part of next week.
02:01Yeah, we may need to watch the northern Gulf.
02:04You always talk about watching the belly of the high, watching underneath an area of high pressure.
02:09There's going to be a little bit of an area of spin that forms along the northern Gulf coast and
02:13can kind of migrate along that area there.
02:16So I think the chance of development is really low, though.
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