Above-normal Atlantic hurricane season expected, warn NOAA, NWS

Federal forecasters predicted an unusually heavy hurricane season at a briefing in New Orleans on Thursday.

“Everything’s in place for an above-average season,” Ken Graham, director of the United States National Weather Service (NWS), told reporters in Louisiana.

The NWS predicts three to five major hurricanes this season.

Hot oceans and still, stagnant air over the ocean mean those storms could bring nearly twice the accumulated power of an average year — called the accumulated cyclone energy — to bear on the east coast of North America, Graham said.

“You have a planet that’s warmer, and ocean temperatures can be impacted by that, and the warmer ocean temperatures are really consistent with us being in a more active [hurricane] season,” Graham said.

Six to 10 total hurricanes will be formed out of the 13 to 19 named storms that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts.

At the high end, those numbers mark a significant uptick of in hurricane activity over an average year, which would see three major hurricanes, seven total hurricanes, and 14 named storms.

Speaking the week before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, Graham warned of the danger of surprise.

The most dangerous hurricanes, he warned, tended to develop fastest. “Every Category 5 storm to ever hit this country was a tropical storm or less three days prior. If you don’t get goosebumps, I’ll repeat it,” Graham said.

“The big ones that hit this country are fast.” 

As he pointed out, a hotter climate doesn’t necessarily mean more hurricanes — just deadlier ones that move slower and carry more water, leading to heavier floods inland.

“We’re seeing some of these floods, and we’re hearing from more and more communities. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve lived here my whole life. I’ve never seen some of these rainfall rates like that,’” he said.

“The water is the biggest killer in these things,” Graham said, in large part because while coastal communities tend to evacuate, inland ones don’t — often because they don’t know they need to. 

Inland flooding during Hurricane Helene, for example, was responsible for the majority of the 230 deaths — something NWS officials said they were addressing with new maps of inland flood risk expected to come out next year.

While Thursday’s briefing was somber, NWS officials also pointed to the new tools they were deploying — new storm models built on data from new satellites, underwater gliders, and radar systems on hurricane hunting planes.

These had led to a decades-long rise in forecast accuracy, Graham said, which allowed the NWS to calculate a probable path for Helene “before it was even a depression — just a bunch of clouds.”

But the briefing, premised on the forecasting accomplishments of a previous administration, was marked by tense questions from reporters about the effect of Trump administration cuts to emergency services and forecasting.

In particular, they focused on widespread departures or firings of employees of the NWS, which has lost more than 10 percent of its staff since January. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is expected to lose nearly a third following cuts ordered by the Trump administration, which has considered shuttering the agency.

Although the National Hurricane Center reports it is fully staffed, 550 employees at regional field offices left or were laid off this year.

That’s a problem because so much of disaster response is local. Reporting in ProPublica Wednesday found that while federal warnings about Helene’s track and danger were “eerily accurate,” many Appalachian communities didn’t put out warnings. 

Asked about the impact of cuts, Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng said changes were “geared toward making a quicker response that is more efficient with the resources that we have, more efficient recovery, more hopefully more money towards mitigation.”

But she said that Graham’s point about the sudden strengthening of storms was “searing in my mind.”

“Almost a million people live here. How do you evacuate an area like this in three days or less?” she asked. 

As far as the larger idea of moving disaster response authority to local governments, Sheng said that as a former federal bureaucrat, “knocking it down, getting more more response to the states, is in theory, a good thing to be talking about.”

“We want to make sure the resources are there, though. And if the responsibility is going to come to the states, I think those of us in the state just want to make sure the resources are there, and the skill and the experience is there.”

Graham warned coastal and inland communities to get ready now. “I’ve said this for decades — there’s no Hurricane Justa — just-a category 2, or category 3. Every one of them is different. The bigger the storm, the slower the storm, the more the impact — I don’t care about the category.”

He warned of specific dangers: the backflow on boys and rivers that flooded nearby houses; the falling trees that destroy property and kill. In particular, there were the “significant” dangers that come after the skies have cleared: the risk of heat injury when the power goes out or dehydration from water loss; the deadly accidents from running generators inside; or from “snakes, gators, fire and mounds” displaced by the storm.

“So we’ve got to be ready. There are no lines for supply right now. No lines for plywood. No lines for water. So while there’s no lines, it’s a good time to get up there and get supplies.”

In a world where hurricanes were changing, Graham added, “We’ve got to convince people of the danger. When you, when you live, you know, 500 miles inland, and you really don’t think that you could be impacted like that, right? So it’s hard for people to understand what has never happened before.” 

—Updated at 12:51 p.m. EDT