A couple of years ago I started paying attention to this whole hurricane thing. Since we’re just into the start of the season now might be a good time to pull out the Who’s Who of 21st century tropical cyclones.
The Big Seven
First came Ana in 2003, the only tropical storm to form (so far) in the Atlantic basin in April.
Cyclone Catarina
Formed in late March of 2004. As an unremarkable category 2 storm in terms of intensity it should have been a non-event ... but it was the first hurricane ever recorded in the chilly, windy south Atlantic. There is no formal naming system south of the equator so the storm has taken its name from Santa Catarina, the Brazilian state where it made landfall.
Hurricane Vince formed in the eastern Atlantic on October 5th, 2005, and struck Spain six days later. This is only the second recorded tropical cyclone to hit Europe and the other one dates back to 1842. Vince was also notable as being the first ‘V’ storm since 1950.
Tropical Storm Zeta, formed December 31st, missing the record for the latest forming storm of the year which remains in the hands of 1954’s Hurricane Alice. The storm persisted into January, with it and Alice being the only two to do so, and it was the 28th storm of the insane 2005 hurricane season.
The Central Pacific Cyclone of 2006 was notable for forming four degrees further north than any other storm and for being only the third storm to form in the central Pacific and cross to the east Pacific. The remnants of this storm hit Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
During the first week of June 2007 Cyclone Gonu formed in the Arabian Sea and made its way into the Gulf of Oman. Storms like this are very rare in that part of the world and Gonu gets props for being the strongest ever recorded since records began in 1945 and the only storm to ever actually enter the Gulf of Oman itself.
Hurricane Bertha was both the easternmost forming tropical storm, the easternmost forming hurricane, and the she was also the longest lived July storm. The westernmost won’t get any recognition as those are just statistical noise – this one is interesting because it demonstrates the waters warm enough for hurricane formation are further east than they have been in the past, despite the prevailing wind driven Gulf Stream that moves waters to the west.
Where’s Katrina?
Katrina, as awful as she was in terms of loss of life, was where and when tropical cyclones are supposed to be. Large storms happen in the Gulf of Mexico, they hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, and they do so in the month of August.
Honorable Mention: Hurricane Huron
The 1996 tropical system dubbed Hurricane Huron is emphatically not a 21st century storm but I have a hard time writing about this sort of thing without including it. The potential for tropical cyclones in the Great Lakes is obviously there, but will our hotter, drier world give us more storms here ... or a lot less water?
What does it all mean?
Hurricanes are forming earlier which means the oceans are warming to hurricane supporting temperatures earlier in the season. Hurricanes are arriving later and persisting into the next calendar year for a given season, another indication of more heat in the oceans than we had previously. Four of the seven are notable for being in places where hurricanes simply aren’t supposed to be, at least not in recorded human history. This is a trend that will continue as the world gets hotter and wilder.