Colorado State University releases 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season Forecast

 Colorado State University is once again predicting another above average hurricane season for the Atlantic Coast.

“A total of 19 named storms. Of those 19, nine becoming hurricanes and of those nine, four becoming major category 3, 4, 5 hurricanes. Hurricanes have winds of 111 miles hour or greater. The average hurricane season has about 14 named storms, of those 14, seven becoming hurricanes and of those seven, three becoming major hurricanes,” said Dr. Philip Klotzbach, a Research Scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University

Klotzbach says the higher-than-normal prediction is because of warmer waters and lack of El Niño conditions.

“When you have El Niño, what then happens is it tends to increase winds in the atmosphere, 20, 30,000 feet out of the west. Those strong winds at upper levels tend to tear apart hurricanes as they’re trying to develop and intensify. Unfortunately, this year we don’t anticipate El Niño conditions.”

Scientists say they look at climate models to see what the environment will look like in future months. They also look at statistical models to analyze historical weather and hurricane data to come up with these predictions.

“We have over 150 years of hurricane data, but it’s really been pretty reliable back to the 1950s, so what we do is we build a statistical model on the last 40 years of data. The reason why we go back about 40 years is because that’s when we have really nice high resolution ocean temperature data, so we select regions that worked well in January through March at forecasting historical hurricane seasons,” said Klotzbach.

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