Growing Number of Scientists Believe Conditions Favorable for Brewing More and Bigger Hurricanes in the Atlantic, Time Reports

Hurricane expert says, “An overall doubling of major hurricane activity”

El Ninos have become muted; La Ninas and La Nadas to become more prominent

September 22, 2003

New York – A growing number of scientists now believe that conditions favorable for brewing more and even bigger hurricanes in the Atlantic locked into place about eight years ago and will probably persist for at least a decade and maybe longer, TIME’s Madeleine Nash reports. “We’re not talking about a minor little increase,” says Stanley Goldenberg, a hurricane expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “but an overall doubling of major hurricane activity.”

Some scientists are convinced that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has shifted into a mode where El Niños, which dominated the 1980s and ’90s, have become muted, allowing La Niñas and La Nadas and their attendant hurricanes to become more prominent. El Niño, promotes high-level westerlies that tear off the tops of Atlantic Ocean storms, while La Niña and La Nada—the name some have given to the neutral phase of the cycle that currently reigns—do the opposite.

The variability of hurricane formation in the Atlantic constitutes one of meteorology’s biggest unsolved puzzles and meteorologists are not counting the 2003 hurricane season out just yet. For among the consequences of increased activity in the Atlantic is an extension of the prime conditions for hurricanes well into the month of October.

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