Into the storm

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Our next story this morning: warm oceans and the storms they create.

The Atlantic hurricane season is starting to stir up this month and it will last until late November. Meteorologists are predicting more storms than average. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports on what’s to blame…

NEWSCAST: Well dozens of counties in Florida have evacuation orders in place…

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Each year, people living along the Atlantic Coast evacuate their homes as hurricanes approach. But some head into the storms.

KEVIN DOREMUS: Every storm kind of has their own personalities, right?

Kevin Doremus is a hurricane-qualified aircraft commander… or a hurricane hunter. Every hurricane season Doremus and his team fly aircraft over and through storms to get meteorologists the most up-to-date and accurate data.

DOREMUS: The best analogy that we like to use is like riding an old wooden roller coaster through a car wash. It's kind of that rickety, bouncy feeling…it's a lot of that.

Meteorologists analyze mountains of data from those flights—tracking humidity, temperature, and wind speed—hoping to better understand tropical storms. The data also helps officials know when people should get out of the way of the storm.

NEWSCAST: So you can see there are five evacuation zones…

This year, Doremus and his team are gearing up for a busy tropical storm season.

RICK SPINRAD: And good morning to everyone…

Rick Spinrad is the administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—or NOAA.

RICK SPINRAD: NOAA is predicting an above-average 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.

In 2023, NOAA predicted 12 to 17 storms before the season started—a below average storm count.

NEWSCAST: This storm left a mark on Big Bend…

But by the end of the year, 21 tropical storms had formed over the Atlantic. That made it a higher than average season…though far below the 30 named storms of 2020.

RICK SPINRAD: The key this year, as in any year, is to get prepared…

This year NOAA is expecting 17 to 25 storms of tropical strength…that’s any storm with at least 39 mile per hour sustained winds. Meteorologists believe as many as 13 of those storms will turn into hurricanes.

Director of NOAA’s Hurricane Center Michael Brennan says there are a couple of reasons for the high prediction. The primary indicator is ocean temperatures:

MICHAEL BRENNAN: Warm ocean water is the fuel and the energy source for tropical storms and hurricanes as they develop.

And it’s not just warmer waters in the Atlantic that cause tropical storms and hurricanes for the gulf, panhandle, and east coast. Tony Lupo is professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri.

LUPO: In the tropical Pacific, the sea surface temperatures will warm every two to seven years, and it's this phenomenon that we call El Nino, we feel that that's triggered by convection in the springtime in the Pacific, but also the earth’s annual trip around the sun.

On top of the current El Niño cycle, a natural disaster two years ago may also be playing a role…

NEWSCAST: And now this, Tonga officials are still working to assess the damage a day after that massive volcanic eruption near the island…

The water vapor plume extended 35 miles into the stratosphere. The event was the largest eruption ever observed from space.

LUPO: We've not witnessed something like this before, but with satellite technology now, we can pick those up.

When a land-based volcano blows its top it sends ash and gasses into the atmosphere—reflecting some of the energy of the sun back into space…lowering global temperatures. But water vapor plumes like the one in 2022 trap some of the heat in our atmosphere…keeping it from escaping into space. The result raises the temperature of the air and ocean surface. Climate change due to natural causes.

NEWSCAST: You get the plume eruption and high ash cloud and that can impact the weather and a hurricane season for months and months…

Two years later, Lupo and others believe that warmer Pacific ocean conditions may be due in part to that natural disaster…in turn, affecting the jet stream over North America…and finally how storms form in the Atlantic.

That may explain the current spike in tropical storms, but NOAA’s data goes back for decades and reveals a general increase in storm frequency since the early 20th century…and a steady increase since the 1990s…

The popular explanation is man-made climate change. But according to professor Lupo, there are more likely explanations.

LUPO: Satellite technology has improved greatly, and so some storms that wouldn't have been captured a decade ago are now being captured and counted in the numbers...

And he’s not alone in that assessment. One article on NOAA’s website asserts that the late 20th century increase in tropical storm frequency is primarily due to that “improved monitoring.”

NEWSCAST: Experts say hurricanes are getting bigger and stronger…

Advanced data collection does point to a changing climate…and that’s to be expected…the climate is not static. It varies greatly from the average year to year. The challenge comes in trying to figure out what’s causing it.

Even with better data—and lots more of it—climate models still can’t process all the variables and reliably predict future weather…as last year’s hurricane predictions from NOAA demonstrate. And that was just a few months out. Computer models that attempt to predict climate change a decade down the road are even more unreliable.

LUPO: We always hear that the sky is falling and that the temperatures are going to rise by some unprecedented amount or some scary amount, but when you look at the actual changes that have occurred, yes, it's warming, but it's not warming as fast as the models project.

SOUND: [AIRPLANE / SCIENCE GEAR AMBI]

As for Kevin Doremus and his hurricane hunter crew…they’re preparing for the next tropical storm, and will once again fly into it instead of away from it…And perhaps his data will further improve scientific models so that they can better reflect reality.

DOREMUS: …we have to because that's where the science needs us to be.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin. Mary Muncy and Paul Butler also contributed to this report.

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