Four named storms in early July set record

updated 5:33 p.m. ET July 9, 2005

Arlene, Bret, Cindy and now Dennis. Storm hunters don’t expect to be hunched over their radar screens and dispatching chase aircraft until Labor Day. But 2005 is no normal year.

Martin Nelson, the lead forecaster at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, says this is the first time the Atlantic hurricane season had four named storms this early since record-keeping began in 1851. The season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

The first three storms never grew beyond tropical storms that dumped rain and cut utilities from Louisiana to the Carolinas. Dennis got its name on July 5 and two days later it had morphed into a Category 4 monster with winds reaching 150 mph. It also is the earliest occurrence of a Category 4 hurricane in the Caribbean, and possibly the U.S., meteorologists say.

Having killed 20 people in Haiti and Cuba, now Dennis has set its sights on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Forecasters predict it will regain strength over warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the storm will hit the mainland anywhere from Florida to Louisiana on Sunday.

'Active season' likely
Researchers have several ideas why this hurricane season is beginning so ferociously, but they say one thing appears likely.

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“If you get these really early big storms,” says senior research meteorologist Hugh Willoughby of Florida International University in Miami, “that means it is likely to be an active season.”

That’s just what 65 million Americans living on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts don’t want to hear.

Hurricanes are among nature’s most fearsome events. A storm can span 400 miles and tower 10 miles high. Inhaling energy from warm seawater, it might churn for a week or more across 3,000 miles before it collapses.

Some people still are rebuilding from last year when five hurricanes and four tropical storms pounded the Atlantic and Caribbean basins in August and September. At least four of the storms caused hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damages. Scientists called it a “once in a lifetime kind of a year.”

Did they speak too soon? Maybe.

That’s because the meteorological conditions that spawned last season’s destruction are persisting in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins this year, and possibly for decades to come.

Forecasts raised
Forecaster William Gray at Colorado State University has upped his 2005 Atlantic hurricane forecast three times since December, beginning with 11 named storms, then 13, then 15. Now he is saying the number of named storms will be “significantly above” the long-term average of 9.6 named storms and 5.9 hurricanes. At least four storms may blow up into major hurricanes like Dennis, nearly twice as many as normal.

The chance of a major hurricane making landfall somewhere on the East Coast, including the Florida peninsula, is nearly twice as high as in an average year, Gray says. For the Gulf coast from Pensacola, Fla. to Brownsville, Texas, the risk is about one-third higher.

Gray and others base their judgments on several measurements of atmospheric and ocean conditions worldwide.

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