The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season Might Be The Strongest In Years
Source: CBS NEWS
It looks like 2016 is shaping up to be a "near-normal" or "above-normal" Atlantic hurricane season, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecasts that this will be the strongest hurricane season since 2012.
In its latest forecast, released Thursday, NOAA says there's a 70-percent chance we'll see 12 to 17 named storms this year, with five to eight expected to develop into hurricanes. Out of this group, two to four are expected to become "major hurricanes," defined as Category 3 or above.
A major hurricane hasn't struck the United States since Wilma hit Florida in 2005 -- the longest "hurricane drought" in U.S. history.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs June 1 through November 30.
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2016-atlantic-hurricane-season-might-be-strongest-in-years/
US Is Dangerously Overdue for a Major Hurricane
The United States is seeing the longest hurricane drought in recorded weather history. When one does strike, experts fear that we'll be underprepared.
The U.S. coastline is in the midst of an unprecedented hurricane drought, with no major storms -- Category 3, 4 or 5 -- making landfall since 2005, the longest such streak in the recorded history of U.S. weather dating back to the 1850s. The last major hurricane to hit the U.S. was Wilma, a Category 5 monster, in October 2005.
And there's been a comparable dearth of smaller hurricanes as well, with just four smaller -- Category 1 or 2--storms in the past seven years. The last such storm to hit the U.S. was Hurricane Arthur, a Category 2 hurricane, which struck North Carolina in July 2014.
Weather researchers, though, say that the hurricane drought is largely a matter of luck. And there's fear that when the streak ends, we may be caught dangerously underprepared for the inevitable monster storm.
Before we go any further, you're probably wondering -- what about Sandy? While that 2012 storm reached the status of Category 3 while it was in the Caribbean, by the time it made landfall in New Jersey, it had weakened into a post-tropical cyclone. Even so, the storm's size was still large enough to inflict massive damage on the East Coast.
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http://www.seeker.com/us-is-dangerously-overdue-for-a-major-hurricane-landfall-1964278452.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Stopped clock and all that, they're going to be right one of these years. 
