This hurricane season is confounding experts and defying forecasts. What the heck is going on?
It's early September - what should be the busiest stretch of hurricane season. Forecasters predicted this one was going to be bad: storm after storm, the most bullish forecasts on record.
[...]
Almost all hurricanes originate from stormy weather coming off the coast of Central Africa. Since about mid-summer, these hurricane seeds have been pushed farther north than usual - even into one of the driest areas on Earth - the Sahara Desert. They have also exited Africa much farther north than normal and have been stunted as a result. Dry, dusty air and cooler ocean temperatures here, off the continent's northwest coast, have combined to choke off storms.
[...]
The African monsoon is supercharged with a ton of moisture, something that can actually delay tropical storm development, a study published in June in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems found. It turns out there's a Goldilocks zone for hurricanes - dry conditions will starve thunderstorms of the fuel they need, but too much can make them so messy that they can't organize into a cyclone. The moisture needs to be just right.
[...]
And as the season drags on, the area where storms start to form later in hurricane season creeps closer to the Caribbean and the US coastline, including in the Gulf of Mexico which is record-warm. Plus, La Niña is expected to build throughout the fall and could give a boost to activity in October and November.
[...]