The 2016 Atlantic hurricane season is winding down even as a late-season hurricane is winding up off Central America, in line with this year’s more active hurricane season forecast.
Tropical Storm Otto spun up into a Category 1 Tuesday afternoon and is already blamed for three deaths in Panama, according to news reports.
It soon lost some punch and weakened slightly to a tropical storm again by Wednesday, but meteorologists are saying it could strengthen to a hurricane again by Thanksgiving, when it’s projected to make landfall in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. If so, it would be the first hurricane to hit Costa Rica in 165 years of recorded history.
Otto’s no threat to Hampton Roads, though: The National Hurricane Center expects it to strike the Central American coast, lose energy again and move westward into the Pacific early Friday, downgraded once more to a tropical storm.
And with no more tropical formations in sight for the next five days, it looks like the official season should close out Nov. 30 with no more hurricanes for the region.
With Otto, the Atlantic basin has now seen 16 named storms and seven hurricanes, three of them major. A major hurricane is Category 3 or above, with sustained winds of 110 mph or greater.
The 2016 season is set to be the strongest and costliest since 2012, which unleashed Superstorm Sandy. That’s largely because of a major hurricane named Matthew.
And Hampton Roads hasn’t been unscathed.
In October, the region suffered only a glancing blow from Matthew, an especially powerful, deadly and long-lived event that devastated Haiti. It was also the first Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic since 2007. A Category 5, the strongest possible classification, has minimum sustained winds of 156 mph.
Matthew is blamed for two deaths, one in Isle of Wight County and one in Suffolk. A third death in Hampton of a man found unresponsive in standing water wasn’t directly attributed to the storm.
The blow knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of households in the state, dumped up to 17 inches of rain across southeastern Virginia and flooded roads and neighborhoods already saturated by a month of rainfall.
Earlier this month, President Barack Obama declared a federal major emergency for Virginia in Matthew’s aftermath, rendering communities in Hampton Roads eligible for federal aid.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs June 1 through November, although it kicked off five months early this year, with Alex in mid-January.
Now, with Otto, it’s unusual to see this much activity this late in the game.
But such activity aligns well with the initial seasonal outlook back in May when the Climate Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called for near-normal to above-normal activity.
“As far as named storms, absolutely yes,” meteorologist Scott Minnick with the National Weather Service in Wakefield said Wednesday of that spot-on federal forecast. “That’s kind of what we see (with) a transition from El Nino to La Nina.”
An El Nino weather pattern tends to suppress hurricane formation in the Atlantic, while a La Nina tends to fuel them. A prolonged El Nino subsided earlier this year while a weak La Nina has been brewing for a while and looks to be just kicking off.
The May forecast was for 10-16 named storms, 4-8 hurricanes and 1-4 major hurricanes.
But by August the prediction center updated its outlook to 12-17 named storms, 5-8 hurricanes and 2-4 major hurricanes.
The average Atlantic season sees 12 named storms and six hurricanes, three of them major. That average is based on activity from 1981 to 2010.
The center can’t predict which of those storms will make landfall.
The emerging La Nina, though weak, could always pose the possibility, however unlikely, of a hurricane forming beyond the season, Minnick said. Such weather patterns more typically affect the winter season — La Ninas tend to make winters in this region a little warmer and dryer than normal.
“So maybe a little less snowfall,” Minnick said. “But it’s always a caveat, especially out here in the mid-Atlantic: One storm, like we saw last January, can really throw a wrench into that forecast. So it’s always something to watch.”
Every year, the Climate Prediction Center uses computer models and various climate signals to calculate pre-season and mid-season hurricane outlooks for the Pacific and the Atlantic. A host of information on hurricanes can be found at hurricanes.gov.
State information on preparing for emergencies and weather events can be found at readyvirginia.gov.
Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.
