Northern Hemisphere TC Season underway

Although the official hurricane season in the Atlantic isn’t considered to start until June 1st, note that the US National Hurricane Center has now started issuing daily updates on May 15th. In the rest of the north the season is underway, with a new depression forming right on top of The Philippines …

Depression One will mostly be a rain event for The Philippines, and while it is forecast to spin up into a full blown typhoon (hurricane) roughly equivalent to a Saffir Simpson Category One, for now the major model tracks keep it away from land during that phase of its life …

Elsewhere, there is an invest area in the northern Indian ocean that the US Joint Typhoon Warning Center (the military’s joint Navy/USAF tracking center) classifies as high risk for becoming a storm. The GFS model is pretty aggressive and spins it up to a cyclone (hurricane) before landfall …

The Northern Bay of Bengal is the worst place in the world for hurricane storm surge. The shallow, concave coast is a perfect ramp for a storm to push water inland. Even as a minimal Category One storm, this invest could push two to three meters (7 to 10ft) of storm surge into the area and cause $3 Billion in damage with over 187 Million people at risk …

If you would like to see what the second worst place in the world for storm surge is, and live in the Savannah/Beaufort/Hilton Head area, go out to the beach and look down: it’s a similar situation, concave shoreline, shallow offshore. So if a storm is coming directly towards the area off the Atlantic, it is an incredibly dangerous situation that can push water far inland. Keep that in mind, as in recent years the bypassing or “back door” storms have not caused a fraction of the impact a “real” hurricane could to this area.

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