First Tropical Weather Update for 2021 and Season Outlook

May 15, 2021

The hurricane season does not officially begin until June 1st, but due to the pre-season activity that has occurred the last several years the National Hurricane Center decided to start providing tropical weather outlooks early. So with that said today we have the first outlook for the 2021 season, with no activity expected over the next 5 days. 

Beyond 5 days it is possible that a subtropical or tropical system could try to spin up near the Florida Straits or over Cuba between Thursday and Tuesday. Other than the GFS there's not much model support so at this point I'd say something significant developing is unlikely. If something were to form I think it'd mainly be a rainmaker and it could head towards the northern Gulf or to the northeast across the Bahamas. I'm really only mentioning it because you'll probably see some noise about it on social media.

What can we expect this season? There are many seasonal forecasts you can find but mostly I like to look at NOAA's and Colorado State's. If you're curious the following site shows predictions from a bunch of sources in graphical form: https://seasonalhurricanepredictions.bsc.es/predictions.

NOAA's forecast doesn't come out until the 20th. CSU's initial forecast was released April 8th (https://tropical.colostate.edu/forecasting.html). They are predicting above-normal activity with 17 named storms, 8 hurricanes, and 4 major hurricanes. Noteworthy is their probabilities for at least one major hurricane landfall in these areas:

1) Entire continental U.S. coastline - 69% (average for last century is 52%)
2) U.S. East Coast Including Peninsula Florida - 45% (average for last century is 31%)
3) Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville - 44% (average for last century is 30%)

If you follow this link you can see impact probabilities for individual states and counties: https://tropical.colostate.edu/resources.html

Crown Weather Service provides a great forecast as well which you can see here: https://crownweather.com/index.php/discussions/2021-atlantic-caribbean-gulf-of-mexico-hurricane-season-forecast-issued-march-10/. I highly recommend a subscription to their weather service. I'll let you follow the link and read, but their forecast numbers, which were published March 10, are similar to CSU's.

Seasonal forecasts have value but they can't tell you when or where storms may impact land or how strong they will be. As you've heard before all it takes it one storm impacting you for it to matter. Today is also the last day of Hurricane Preparedness Week, not that you can't continue to prepare... The following link has a wealth of information on things to consider and how to prepare: https://www.weather.gov/wrn/hurricane-preparedness.

That's it for today. I'll send out updates at least biweekly or more frequently as conditions warrant.

Have a great weekend!

Chris