Tropical Cyclone

Are you more accurate than a random number generator? Now that it's mid-May and we are just a couple of weeks away from the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season, it is time to enter AIR's annual Hurricane Contest.

People like to name things, whether animals, cars, or storms, so they can more easily identify and remember them. Meteorological organizations have been naming tropical storm systems since the 1950s, which has proved popular with the general public, media, weather forecasters, and catastrophe modelers. The practice of naming storms, however, is not as simple as it may at first appear.

As this year's hurricane season approaches, many are wondering if the 10-year drought of major hurricane landfalls experienced by the U.S. will come to an end.

It is well known that there is no real typhoon season in the Pacific north of the equator and west of the Date Line—the Northwest Pacific basin. Unlike the North Atlantic, which has official start and end dates of June 1 and November 30, the Northwest Pacific basin is open for business all year round.

Five years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Tropical Cyclone Winston continues to churn in the South Pacific, days after devastating Fiji as a Category-5 storm, the strongest ever to strike the island nation.

Here we are, smack dab in the middle of one of the strongest—if not the strongest—El Niño events in recorded history, and we get a hurricane in the Atlantic in January! 

Florida has not seen a single hurricane landfall in ten years, and has experienced hurricane landfalls in just five years of the last twenty.

The strong El Niño of 2015 produced an Atlantic season with the climatological average number of tropical cyclones. However, as expected, it greatly enhanced activity in the Eastern and Central Pacific.

If we ask ourselves where in the world the greatest threat from storm surge is, the Philippines may not immediately come to mind. But it should.