New Hurricane Forecasting
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Even though East and Gulf coast hurricanes come from the Atlantic, they take their cues from the Pacific. Now there's a new way forecasters can look to the west to find out what'll happen to the east. Hi I'm Dave Thurlow for the Mount Washington Observatory and this the Weather Notebook.

We already know that the Atlantic produces fewer hurricanes than usual during El Niño years. That's because El Niño makes upper winds blow against the grain of Atlantic storms, often tearing them apart. La Niña has the opposite effect. It helps the upper winds to blow in synch with the Atlantic trade winds. That means a developing hurricane has a lot less stress to deal with. Because we can predict El Niño and La Niña a few months ahead, we now know whether to expect a lot of hurricanes or only a few in a given season.

But there's more to the story. No matter how busy or quiet a season is, hurricanes tend to cluster. Often you'll go through one month without any named storms, then three or four will pop up the next month. Now there's a way to predict these clusters in advance.

A group at the University of Washington is studying a regular pulse of showers and thunderstorms in the Pacific. It's called the MJO, or the Madden-Julian Oscillation. The research team found there are four times as many Gulf hurricanes during particular phases of this Pacific rainy cycle. By tracking the MJO, it might become possible to predict a hurricane cluster several weeks in advance.

Our show is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive. Partial funding comes from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.