The start of the Atlantic hurricane season has always been my favorite time of the year. My love of hurricanes and all tropical weather started when I was 8 years old and Hurricane Gloria affected southeastern New York where I grew up. I had a hurricane chart and I would studiously plot the storms all season long.
Even after I started my meteorological career, I was still fascinated by tropical weather. I plotted the storms both at work and at home and poured over satellite and raw tropical data while waiting for storms to form.
Lately though it seems like there isn’t much waiting around for storms to form. There seem to always be storms. We have already had 3 named systems and we aren’t even a full month into the season. Gone are the days when our first named storm was in August. So why is that? Is it because of global warming as the news media claims? I think not!
As a retired meteorologist, my frustration level is through the roof. I used to hold a great deal of respect for the National Hurricane Center. I aspired to work there one day. One of my meteorological idols worked at the NHC. The past few years, my opinion of the NHC has dramatically decreased. The standards have significantly lowered and I’m not sure why. It seems like they are naming absolutely every tropical system even if it is subtropical and has no tropical characteristics. This would not have happened 10 years ago. I’m really not sure why this is happening. I’m not sure if they are pushing a certain political agenda or if they are trying to pad the numbers to make predictions verify. Regardless, what they are doing is not scientific.
Don’t be fooled! There are not more tropical systems, they are just naming things that would never have been named years ago.
I still love tropical weather but I’ll stick to plotting the REAL tropical systems.
