The 2024 hurricane season is fast approaching, and expectations are set for heightened activity due to warm sea surface temperatures across the Atlantic’s main development region, coupled with signs pointing towards a resurgence of La Niña conditions in the Pacific. These factors are likely to contribute to a more active season, although predicting the number of hurricanes making landfall, remains a complex challenge.
The Inigo Cat Research team have been working with data from Reask to calculate the mean number of landfalls in the Reask data as a function of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index and sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic. In the figure, the dashed white box represents a range of ENSO values and sea surface temperatures that have been forecast for this season, providing insights into expected landfall scenarios. Based on this, this season’s activity is suggestive of a distribution whose average is 3 or 4 hurricanes of Category 1 or higher making landfall in the US this year. It remains to be seen how the synoptic steering flows will set up or if an outbreak of Saharan dust can still dampen activity this year.
