This morning, the Hurricane forecasting team at Colorado State University (Bill Gray) officially reduced their numbers for tropical storms in the Atlantic Basin for the 2007 season.  The CSU group is now calling for 15 tropical storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes.  This is down from their May 31 forecast, which was calling for 17, 9 and 5 respectively.  While the 2007 season is far from over, there are a few major reasons for the decreased activity.  Dust storms, which can be hurricane suppressors, have been visible from satellite imagery moving across the Atlantic into the Caribbean and are more prevalent than what many had expected at the onset of the 2007 season.  Further, earlier in the year forecasters at NASA (among others) were calling for a strong La Nina to develop which would be conducive for tropical system formation; that hasn’t happened as we have seen relatively neutral conditions along the equatorial Pacific Ocean.  A final factor is that SSTs in the Atlantic Ocean have not been warm enough for an extremely active season to develop.  Weather Trends International is keeping our total named storm numbers unchanged at 12-13. 

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Energy, Global Weather, Hurricanes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.