Hurricane season is still more than a month away, but here in Florida, it's never too early to start preparing.
This year, things could be different, as it appears there may be an El Niño on the way.
What is El Niño?
El Niño is just one of the processes, and we're always seeing changes in the environment.
Normally we have cool waters off the coast of South America, the Central American coastline and the east Pacific with strong equatorial currents going from east to west.
In the Atlantic basin, warm water and low pressure are in normally in place across the Atlantic basin, over to the Philippines and Australia.
As an El Niño builds, high pressure brings drought conditions that begin to settle in across the Atlantic. In the Pacific, water temperatures begin to spread back to the east. A strong counter-current moves from west to east, warming the waters off the Central and South American coasts.
Tropical shifts in temperatures
With the thermocline, temperatures change more rapidly with depth than it does in the layers above or below.
In January 1997, the warm waters were back towards the Philippines. But as El Niño took place, the warm temperatures pushed off into the east, helping support stronger winds that come across the Pacific basin as we move into the peak of hurricane season.
How does it affect our hurricane season?
During El Niño, a strong high vertical wind shear begins to come across Central American and out into the Caribbean.
When that takes place, the shear will basically tear a tropical wave apart as it moves across the Atlantic.
We saw a lot of that in the last couple of strong El Niño effects that try to take place.
El Niño doesn’t always mean a quiet season?
Not always. Let’s go back to August 1992 when Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida. With winds of 175 miles per hour, the storm caused 44 fatalities in the Sunshine State and $26.5 billion in damage.
What does it mean for the weather afterwards?
Once we move past hurricane season, it’s not quite over yet. This is where El Niño really begins to build.
Typically you have a jet stream that moves across Mexico and dips into the southern part of the state, just like a polar jet stream dropping down into the Midwest.
During El Niño, the jet stream bends further to the south and delivers warmer temperatures into the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Florida and across the Southeast. We’ll also see a wetter than average season, along with the potential for some very strong storms to develop, especially in January, February and March.