With the Atlantic hurricane season beginning on June 1, the N.C. State department of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences released its annual prediction on the number and intensity of hurricane activity within the Atlantic basin last week.
The prediction states that the Atlantic basin will see between 13 to 15 named storms, which are tropical storm force or higher, with six to eight of those becoming hurricanes, according to Elinor Keith, a graduate research assistant.
This year’s prediction is comparable to many of the predictions in recent years, Keith said.
“This [prediction] is nowhere near 2005, but it’s pretty normal for recent years,” Keith said. “Ever since 1995, we’ve been in a pretty active cycle.”
Since 1995, the Atlantic basin, which includes the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, has averaged almost eight hurricanes per year, with the high mark of 14 hurricanes in 2005, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Web site.
According to Keith and Lian Xie, director of the NCSU research on Centennial Campus, 2008 will be a year of several named storms but a relatively low number of predicted landfalls.
“We predict two to four named storms to make landfall along the Gulf Coast with one to two along the southeast,” Keith said.
The southeast is the region between the Atlantic coast of Florida through North Carolina, she said.
The research and prediction from the researchers at NCSU is not directly connected with any other hurricane forecasters, but the data they used in making the prediction is some of the same that other groups use, according to Keith.
“There is a lot of literature out there that you have to keep up with,” she said. “Several other groups are issuing predictions, but this prediction is really our own.”
One of those groups, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will release its hurricane prediction next month, according to Darin Figurskey, the Meteorologist-in-Charge at the Raleigh office on Centennial Campus.
“Most of the predictions are done pretty independently,” he said. “There are a lot of similarities between groups — they all look at sea surface temperatures [and] steering winds, but each group has its individual techniques for making predictions. The Tropical Prediction Center will come out with its own [prediction] in May.”
The prediction that the Climate Prediction Center makes can help the Raleigh NOAA office when preparing for facing storms that may make landfall in North Carolina and affect Raleigh, Jeff Orrock, a warning coordinator in Raleigh, said.
Orrock said the predictions that all groups make are based on trends, and can never be completely accurate but can help with evacuation planning.
“Everybody had high predictions in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and nobody was right,” he said. “Nobody ever really hits the numbers 100 percent, but they get the trends pretty good.”
The upcoming hurricane season, which runs from June through the end of November, is something that cannot be completely forecasted, but the technology for better predictions is improving, according to Orrock.
“The longer you try to forecast out into the future, definitely the more inherent error your going to introduce,” Orrock said. “The state of the science is improving, but it’s still not 100 percent.”
