NOAA’s head director Conrad C. Lautenbacher, last May, announces a busy 2007 hurricane season. Photo courtesy of NOAA

Depending on whom you believe, we are going to have a busy hurricane season or a not so busy one.

Depending on whom you believe, our ability to predict hurricanes is severely hampered, or everything is fine.

Such is the situation with Hurricane Season 2007, which officially opened June 1 and continues through November.

Subtropical Storm Andrea, though, never got the memo. Andrea formed a couple hundred miles off the coast of Savannah, Ga., on May 9. The storm produced gale-force winds that blew forest fire smoke from the northern parts of Florida into Miami’s skies and 10 foot waves that managed to drown a surfer in Volusia County. Andrea was the first pre-season named storm to form since Tropical Storm Ana in 2003. Andrea was also the first pre-season storm in the Atlantic since Tropical Storm Arlene in 1981. (For some context, consider: Arlene formed three months before the launch of MTV, a network that repeatedly showed the Buggles’ video, “Video Killed the Radio Star.”)

And so, on May 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that, according to forecasters’ calculations, there is a 75 percent chance the “Atlantic Hurricane Season will be above normal this year.” By above normal, NOAA meant “13 to 17 named storms with seven to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which three to five could become major hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher,” said NOAA’s head administrator, Retired Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher. As if to underscore the pending doom, Tropical Storm Barry formed on June 1, the first day of hurricane season. It crashed into Tampa, bringing much rain and not much else.

Two years ago was the most active hurricane season in recorded history, spawning so many named storms, 28 in all, that hurricane forecasters began naming cyclones after Greek letters. Of those storms, 15 were hurricanes and seven were deemed “major hurricanes,” including Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, and Hurricane Wilma, which caused significant damage in South Florida.

An above-average season was also predicted for 2006: 17 named storms, nine of them hurricanes and five of them powerful hurricanes. But that season only produced 10 named storms, with five of them being hurricanes and just two of those major ones. NOAA blamed the discrepancy on El Niño, which “rapidly developed and created a hostile environment for Atlantic storms to form and strengthen. When storms did develop, steering currents kept most of them over the open water and away from land,” according to NOAA’s May 22 statement.

This season, La Niña may pay a visit, which would produce “warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean.” Emphasis on the word “may.”

“There is some uncertainty this year as to whether or not La Niña will form, and if it does how strong it will be,” Gerry Bell, lead hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, said via NOAA. But even if La Niña doesn’t show up, “the conditions associated with the ongoing active hurricane era still favor an above-normal season,” Bell stated.

Don’t tell that to the British. According to the United Kingdom’s Met Office, there will only be 10 named storms in 2007, in addition to the two that have already come and died, the Palm Beach Post reported on June 21. The reason: a cooling trend on the Atlantic’s surface. The UK Met uses a “dynamical” global climate computer model system instead of NOAA’s “statistical” system. “Our method… uses models of the climate that include all the laws of physics and supercomputers together to predict what’s going to be happening over the coming season,” UK Met’s Matt Huddleston told the Palm Beach Post.

Meanwhile, because of rising costs, the U.S. Department of Defense has decided to launch only four new weather forecasting satellites instead of the intended six that will replace orbiting climate devices that are expected to conch out soon, the Associated Press reported on June 4. Those new satellites will also be “less capable” than their predecessors. As a result, the United States will “rely on European satellites for most of the climate data.” “Unfortunately, the recent loss of climate sensors… places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy,” a Dec. 11 report from NOAA and NASA, obtained by the AP, stated. The American Association for the Advancement of Science issued an equally severe statement last May: “Declines will result in major gaps in the continuity and quality of the data gathered about the Earth from space.” And Bill Proenza, the director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, warns that one particular satellite, QuickSTAT, will reach the end of its estimated life soon. He also questioned, in the pages of the Miami Herald, NOAA’s priorities, most specifically a $700,000 budget cut for hurricane predictions and a $4 million campaign to celebrate a purported 200-year anniversary of NOAA.

In response, Proenza was issued a letter that basically told him to stop talking to the media. NOAA also issued a press release assuring that the agency’s weather satellites currently work and are ready. “With an active Atlantic hurricane season expected for 2007, NOAA’s high-powered satellites are ready to send forecasters a steady stream of crisp detailed images, and other important data, of any storm that develops in the Western Hemisphere.”

The release goes on to state NOAA has a “fleet” of “four geostationary spacecraft: two are in operation, one is stored in orbit as a ready backup and one satellite currently used to provide better coverage of South America as part of the World Meteorological Organization’s World Weather Watch Global Observations Systems. GOES are the nation’s primary hurricane spotters from space.” NOAA also has polar-orbiting satellites: “two that are operational, including a spacecraft in a joint venture with Europe, with three more serving as backup satellites.” The POES, as the release calls them, are “key in monitoring changes in the atmosphere and ocean temperatures and climate phenomena, such as El Niño and La Niña.”

In short, “NOAA Satellites Show Moxie,” the release states, and they were able to send 11,736 images of cyclones during the busy 2005 season. The release also stated, NOAA and NASA “are planning the next generation of satellites that will strengthen the prediction and tracking of hurricanes.”

“Since the first GOES satellite began monitoring the weather in 1975, we have never stopped trying to make this system better,” Mary Kicza, a NOAA assistant administrator, said in the press release.

Besides, if things go awry, there’s always UK Met.

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