TEXAS TROPICS

The official start of the Atlantic hurricane season is just over a month away, but an outrageous looking super cell thunderstorm over central Texas last night was about as scary looking on satellite imagery as any tropical system you could imagine.  This thing blew up as big as any tropical storm or hurricane we typically see. The mega cold cloud tops represented by the white, gray and black, is where intense straight line winds were produced, that in some instances are more than capable of reaching hurricane strength. There were plenty of tornadoes spinning up in this thing as well. The updrafts were so powerful in this mega super cell that it produced hail the size as softballs near Hondo, TX, just west of San Antonio. photo courtesy of @TheRealDoctorT This incredible super cell had a reach from near Del Rio at the southern Texas border, to near Texarkana at the northern Texas border. That's nearly 600 miles. That's a big storm. A lot of tropical systems are in the 300-400 mi...

Tropical systems in the southern hemisphere, everything south of the equator, happen throughout the world on a consistent basis. In the south Pacific tropical cyclones affect areas near the Philippines and eastern Australia. The southern Indian ocean sees storms affecting western Australia and as far west as eastern Africa. Tropical systems south of the equator spin in a clockwise rotation, as opposed to the counter-clockwise spin we typically see in our part of the world. When you think of tropical systems in the Atlantic ocean, you think of the area north of the equator between Africa and North America. This includes the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. This is because this is where almost all tropical systems in the Atlantic ocean form. In the last 20 years 320 systems have developed into tropical storm status in this area, an average of 16 storms every single year. Last year a record high 30 systems formed. But what about the ...

As the start of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season draws ever closer, updated and finalized predictions of how the upcoming season will turn out are making their way to the forefront. These typically don't hold a lot of meaning, as no one ever dreamed of what happened last season, when a record 30 storms were named. But because of that record breaking season, it is a little interesting to see what the experts think the follow up to that will be. Going back and looking at mega active seasons out of the norm, we look at the 1995 and 2005 seasons. We see that the activity following both of those seasons were significantly down. In 1995, there were 19 named storms, 2 names short of exhausting the names list for what would have been the 1st time ever. This is when we learned that Greek letters would be used to name storms if the list was exhausted. The following season (1996) saw just 13 named storms, slightly above the normal range of expectancy, where the pre-season predictions were i...