Forecast: better next year?

Japan was hit this year by 10 typhoons.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
Storm weary residents of Florida and the rest of the Southeast can take a little consolation from the first forecast of tropical weather for next year.
While researchers led by Colorado State University climate specialist William Gray foresee a "slightly above-average hurricane season for the Atlantic basin" the team hastens to add in the forecast released Friday that "we do not expect anything close to the landfalling hurricane activity of 2004."
With the sudden, though innocuous, appearance of Tropical Storm Otto on Nov. 30, the last day of the official hurricane season, this year saw 15 named storms, of which nine hit the U.S. coastline.
Six of those storms -- Alex, Charley, Frances, Gaston, Ivan and Jeanne -- were hurricanes; Charley, Ivan and Jeanne made landfall as major hurricanes with winds in excess of 115 miles per hour.
Gray's team is still predicting that both the entire U.S. coastline and the East Coast, including all of Florida, are at above-average risk of being hit by at least one major hurricane in 2005 -- a 69 percent chance for the entire coastline and 49 percent odds for the East Coast and Florida.
Gray noted that the train of storms hitting Florida this year was mirrored by 10 typhoons that hit Japan this season, also a product of unusually warm sea water in the Pacific and a pattern of wind and pressure that kept steering storms along similar tracks.
Long term
Overall, the new forecast predicts Atlantic tropical storm activity will be about 115 percent of the long-term average, continuing a trend that began in 1995 and that Gray and other hurricane experts believe may persist for several more decades.
Gray attributes this mainly to slightly warmer sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and a shift in wind patterns in the high atmosphere in the tropics that encourages hurricane activity.
"We expect that the hurricane season of 2005 will follow -- although with somewhat less intensity -- this recent 10-year upswing in hurricane activity," Gray said.