TEXAS TROPICS

2023 will go down as a moderate to strong El Ni ñ o year. El Ni ñ o typically means tropical action in the Atlantic basin is suppressed. 2023 also had some of the warmest water temperatures in the Atlantic basin on record. Warm water is of course the jet fuel for tropical systems. Because of the unusually warm waters, the 2023 hurricane season will go down as the most active El Ni ñ o season ever recorded as 20 named storms formed in the Atlantic this season. The previous high for an El Ni ñ o of at least moderate strength was 12 storms in 1951. The warm water didn't totally win out over El Ni ñ o though. Most of the action this season formed in the MDR ( main development region ) and recurved to the subtropical Atlantic. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico stayed relatively quiet. There were only 3 storms active within the Caribbean Sea this year ( Bret , Franklin and Idalia ). There were a couple of others that scraped along the Leeward Islands ( Philippe and Ta...

1983 was one of the least active Atlantic hurricane seasons on record. The Atlantic basin only had 4 named storms in 1983, not only the fewest in the satellite era (1965), and since storms started receiving names (1950), it's the least amount of at least tropical storm strength systems since there were only 3 recorded in 1930, and is tied for the 3rd fewest all-time, or since records became official in 1851. 1983 was coming off a strong El Nino event during the '82-'83 hurricane seasons, where there were just 10 named storms during that 2 year stretch. '83 was so quiet that it wasn't until late July when the 1st tropical depression of the season formed almost 1,000 miles southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands. This system made it to the Lesser Antilles as a depression before dissipating in the Caribbean. Tropical depression #2 formed 4 days after TD1, about 250 miles SW of the Cabo Verde Islands. 6 days later it dissipated just north of the Leeward Islands. On the mor...

How do you know when a new hurricane season is approaching? When Colorado State University , the foremost authority of cyclone predicting, comes out with their annual preseason predictions. One of the biggest factors in this year's forecast is the expected El Niño, which should be in full force come the meat part of the season starting in August. El Niño, if you don't know, typically means less tropical activity in the Atlantic basin. Of course, if we go back to August of last year, where we were in a 3rd year La Niña, which typically means more Atlantic activity, you'll remember we had ZERO named storms in the month of August. It was the first stormless August in 25 years, and just the 4th since 1930. We also went 60 full days, from July 4th through September 1st without a named storm in the Atlantic, the 6th longest in-season stormless streak on record. So you'd almost think we were in the midst of El Niño last year. That stormless August last year really put a dent i...

Waking up from a long winter's nap with a new hurricane season just beyond the horizon. We're so close, in fact, the 2023 preseason predictions should start trickling in within the next couple of weeks or so.  Meanwhile, the WMO ( World Meteorological Organization ) had a retirement party earlier this week. Two systems from last year's season get retired, Ian and Fiona . Ian Hurricane Ian becomes the 13th storm that starts with the letter "I" to get retired ( 14th if you count the Greek letter Iota in 2020 ). The letter "I" easily leads the pack for the most retired storms. It wasn't until post-season analysis that Ian got an upgrade to a category 5 hurricane after it crossed Cuba and entered the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. This makes Ian the 1st cat 5 in the Atlantic basin since Lorenzo in 2019, and the 1st cat 5 in the Gulf since Michael in 2018. Ian struck and crossed Cuba as a cat 3 blow on Sep. 27. A day later, as it was nearing the south...

The 2022 Hurricane Season was the 1st in 8 years that didn't start with a preseason named storm. So considering an Invest popped up on the 1st "official" day of hurricane season, a system that eventually turned into Tropical Storm Alex , things got off to a rather slow start, which was basically getting back to normal. The 1st raised eyebrows for the state of Texas for the 2022 season didn't come until June 25th when the NHC tagged an AOI ( area of interest ) from the north central to northwestern Gulf of Mexico. Over the next couple of days, models were on and off about developing this AOI, but all either had it moving into Texas, or at the very least bringing much needed rainfall to the Lone Star State. This AOI was eventually tagged Invest 95L . Models started out pointing it towards the Texas/Mexico border. Later they were having it make a sharp right before it got to the coast down there, and bringing it up to around Matagorda Bay. Development of the system was n...

July gets started where June left off with 3 marks on the map. A tropical wave with a 10% chance of formation east of the Lesser Antilles, Invest 95L in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, and Potential Tropical Cyclone #2 in the SW Caribbean. We'll start with the tropical wave that entered the eastern Caribbean then fizzled out. Or to be more technical, conditions were not favorable for development and nothing becomes of it. Next was Invest 95L . This system had a mesoscale vortex form near Galveston, TX that literally moved most of the rain out of the Houston area. The Golden Triangle area ended up getting the bulk of the rain from this system, leaving much of the rain starved central Texas coast pretty much high and dry.  The final holdover from June was PTC2. On July 1st, this system had been designated a PTC for a record 6 days. The NHC only started referring to these systems as a PTC since 2017. Incidentally, the record PTC2 broke was that of PTC1 last month. So finally after 6...