Ana?

After nearly 2 1/2 months of El Niño-induced calm in the Atlantic tropics, things are finally heating up. Tropical Depression Two has formed off the Cape Verde islands, and is likely to become Tropical Storm Ana over the next couple of days. This would be the latest formation date for the Atlantic basin’s “A” storm since… well, since 1992, when Andrew formed on August 17, not far from where proto-Ana is now. Not to suggest that Ana is likely to be another Andrew, but it just goes to show that a slow-starting or below-average hurricane season is no guarantee we won’t see devastating storms.

Apropos of which, yesterday’s computer model runs were showing some interesting long-term solutions for the storm’s potential track:

GFS continues to spin this system into a hurricane. It is more aggressive with the strength of the future cyclone, and it has taken a new tack: Hatteras landfall, followed by a curving course right up the coast, then into New England via NYC, still at hurricane force. This is a worst-case scenario for that region.

Of course, such long-range, single-model forecasts are subject to massive errors (I mean, like, many thousands of miles’ worth of errors). As the above-quoted Alan Sullivan added, “Tomorrow GFS might aim the storm at Nova Scotia, or Yucatan. It is still very early.” And indeed, already this morning, there are signs of a different trend: “Five day forecast hints at turn to the WNW which would increase the odds of this storm remaining over open ocean throughout its life span.”

P.S. Welcome, InstaPundit readers! This is my first Instalanche on the new blog, The Living Room Times, which I launched on June 23 after a lengthy blog “hiatus.” The new server seems to be holding up pretty well so far.

Anyway, since I mentioned 1992, which is the prototypical example of a late-starting, below-average season that everybody remembers because of its one terrible storm, I should probably also mention 2000, the only other hurricane season in the last two decades with no named storms till August (T.S. Alberto formed on August 4). The U.S. mainland saw zero hurricane landfalls, and just two tropical storm landfalls, in 2000. More broadly, the season’s 15 named storms and 8 hurricanes, none of which made landfall as major hurricanes, caused “only” 50 deaths throughout the Atlantic basin — the fourth-lowest total in a season since ’92.

Also, since Instalanched weather posts always seem to devolve into climate-change debates, I should probably issue the Official BrendanLoy.com Statement On Global Warming^TM: This blog is officially agnostic, both on the existence and extent of anthropogenic global warming, and on the impact any such warming would have on hurricane development (which is a separate question). I occasionally get excitable, and perhaps even a little sensationalistic, about severe weather events, but that’s just because I’m a weather enthusiast and a “master of disaster” (as my Dad used to call me), not because of some hidden political agenda. I am a weather nerd, not a climate nerd — and I get very irritated by people, on both sides of the AGW debate, who confuse weather and climate. They’re not the same thing, people. A big hurricane, or a bad hurricane season, doesn’t “prove” global warming, and likewise, a slow season, or a cold day in some random city that Matt Drudge picks out of a hat, doesn’t “disprove” it. And that’s all I have to say about that.