Expect a busy 2022 hurricane season, North Carolina
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Hurricane Florence, as it zeroed in on the North Carolina coast in 2018. Photo: NOAA via Getty Images
Just as North Carolinians prepare for one of our favorite rites of passage — beach season — the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration sent out an ominous alert on Tuesday:
- The upcoming Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be unusually active, Axios Andrew Freedman reports.
Why it matters: Hurricanes, nature’s most destructive storms, have tested North Carolina’s resilience over the past decade like no other issue, natural or manmade.
Most will remember the big names:
- Matthew, in 2016, devastated the I-95 corridor around Lumberton in what many people called a 500-year storm.
- Two years later, though, came one even worse, Florence, one the wettest storms in history, dumping 3 feet of rain in some places as it parked its menacing center right off of the coast near Southport.
- And Dorian, which in 2019 whipped a 7-foot storm surge on the idyllic Ocracoke Island and left people there without power for months.
But even hurricanes that don’t make headlines cause major trouble. Last July, remnants of Hurricane Elsa, which made landfall in Florida, zipped up the seaboard and dropped between 4 to 6 inches of rain in areas around Raleigh.
- And most folks won’t remember Hurricane Isaias, which made landfall at Ocean Isle Beach in August 2020; but several people who lost their homes in the fires that followed won’t ever forget.
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The big picture: This would be the seventh straight year of above-average activity, Andrew reports.
- The past two hurricane seasons exhausted the list of 21 storm names, which was unprecedented. The 2020 season was the most active on record.
Details: NOAA is forecasting a 65% chance that the upcoming hurricane season will be above average, with a 25% chance of near-normal activity and a 10% chance of below-normal tropical cyclone numbers.
- The agency is predicting a 70% chance of 14 to 21 named storms. Of these, six to 10 would become hurricanes, and of these, three to six would intensify into major hurricanes of Category 3 or greater.
- A typical Atlantic hurricane season has 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Context: NOAA bases its forecast on several factors, including sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean Basin and the presence of a La Niña event in the tropical Pacific Ocean.