HURRICANE SEASON IS ON ITS LAST LEGS
Barring some freak event down the road, the 2020 Hurricane Season is essentially over. The National Hurricane Center is noting an area between the Bahamas and Bermuda where a system might form late Sunday or Monday, but it’s not likely to amount to much. And there’s only a very slight chance it will develop at all.
The cold front that passed through South Florida a few days ago is draped from the middle of the Atlantic into the Caribbean. The front represents a zone with shifting winds, in other words, the air in that area has a bit of rotation.
An upper-level disturbance caught in the jet stream flow is forecast by some computer forecast models to combine with the front to create an area of low pressure well off the Southeast U.S. coast. If it indeed develops, there’s a slight chance it could become a quasi-tropical system over the warm waters near Bermuda.
Even if all these ifs and maybes come together, it is not expected to be a significant threat to Bermuda, and it will be moving away from the U.S.
Otherwise, the atmospheric pattern is looking a lot like winter. The strong high-pressure system over the East Coast will slowly move east this week. As it moves away, the strong winds blowing off the ocean will slowly let up. By Sunday, it will be noticeably calmer.
Except for the maybe system near Bermuda, nothing appears in the offing through the official end of hurricane season on November 30th.
In the Caribbean, there are no longer any organized systems, but over the next few days, some rain is still forecast over the Central American countries so badly affected by Hurricanes Eta and Iota. It’s won’t be organized, continuous, brutal rain like during the hurricanes, but I’m sure it will be unwelcome at the very least.
Folks in the hurricane-effected zones in Central America are going to need a lot of help. Something to remember this holiday season.
Unless something unexpected happens between now and the end of the year, we’ll end the 2020 Hurricane Season with a pile of new records. But taken as a whole, I would still rank it behind 2005 because we haven’t seen, thankfully, as many super strong storms.
The 2005 season produced Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, plus another Category 5 storm we tend to forget named Emily, which tracked through the Caribbean. This year, we’ve only had one Category 5, and bizarrely it came in November – Hurricane Iota last Monday, just before it hit Nicaragua.
With just a little luck, we’ll get to close the book on Hurricane Season 2020 very soon.