It’s hard to ignore El Niño’s outsized influence on the Atlantic hurricane season, especially this year with what’s on pace to be the strongest El Niño on record. So if lately this newsletter is beginning to feel a little bit like an El Niño blog, it’s for good reason.
El Niño’s most prominent mark on the hurricane season is to ratchet up vertical wind shear – the scissor-like wind pattern that lops off the tops of organizing storm seedlings before they can develop into strong hurricanes. The increase in wind shear is highest in the western part of the tropical Atlantic, especially across the Caribbean, which also helps to reduce the number of U.S. landfalls during El Niño years.
Typically, however, it takes a little time for the abnormal warming of the waters in the eastern Pacific – the ocean phenomenon that defines El Niño – to link arms with the atmosphere and change global circulation patterns that ultimately reshape winds over the tropical Atlantic. Since El Niño peaks in the late fall and winter, we usually start to see the atmospheric response by August and September, as the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season hits.
This year, however, it appears we’re seeing that atmospheric feedback to the strengthening El Niño earlier than usual, which could be a result of the record-setting pace of the warming so far in the eastern equatorial Pacific.
Wind shear in the bellwether Caribbean has shot up like a skyscraper since mid-June and is the second highest to start July (second only behind 2015, another strong El Niño year) since satellite records began in 1979.
As we’ve discussed in previous newsletters, by July the wind shear load across the Caribbean becomes one of the most reliable predictors of future seasonal hurricane activity. The more shear we see in the Caribbean in July, generally the less overall tropical activity we should expect in August, September, and October.
It’s still early in the month, but forecast models show no signs of the shear surrendering its Caribbean stronghold. If anything, the shear looks to only increase over the coming weeks, with a bullseye of exceptionally strong wind shear centered squarely over the Caribbean.
If this is any indication, the tropical Atlantic will have some heavy lifting to do to churn out much activity in the months ahead. Of course, in any given week, the winds can relax enough for a hurricane to slip through the cracks (hurricanes are a given every season, even in strong El Niño years), and we’ll want to watch the subtropics a little more closely, especially east of Florida, but overall these trends bode well for a noticeably less active hurricane season.
And as we would expect, forecast models continue to advertise a very sleepy Atlantic, with no signs of life into at least late July.
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