Hurricane Season Forecast for Atlantic Basin.....How low can you go?

Colorado State University has come out with their annual guesscast for the activity of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean Basin for 2014. The lowdown? Only 9 named storms of which only 3 will be hurricanes. A typical year has 12 named storms and 7 hurricanes.

That might be a relief in some circles except that CSU has been significantly off target the past 2 years, predicting a low number in 2012 and we had lots of storms and predicting lots of storms for last year and we had a low number. So, I guess they are due to be right and let's hope that this is the year, third try is the charm and all.

Apparently, El Nino is the culprit in this low forecast as a moderate to strong El Nino event will hamper the formation of tropical storms, or so they say.

Weathermon

Starting in June I watch this website almost daily. You can see when they form in the Atlantic, their strenght, and their projected path.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

http://www.wsvn.com/weather


This site sually has a pretty good interactive map with forecast models overlapped.

Man, I miss Bryan Norcross.

If I remember correctly, the 2013 "guesscast" was that it was going to be very active. However, there were only 15 tropical cyclones and only 2 hurricanes. Hardly what I'd call "very active". I'd still buy trip insurance. The past has shown that they could be mistaken.