With uncanny timing, Seth Borenstein of the AP turned in a story on this year's quiet hurricane season just hours before the quiet ended with the formation of this year's first hurricane, Humberto.
"If Humberto stays a tropical storm through 8 a.m. EDT Wednesday, it will be the latest date for the first hurricane of the season since satellites started watching the seas in 1967, according to the National Hurricane Center," Borenstein writes. Humberto became a hurricane just before the deadline, meaning that the record for the latest hurricane of the year is still held by Gustav, in 2002, according to Kim Hjelmgaard of USAToday.
All teasing aside, Borenstein's story is actually nicely timed, because it answers a question that Humberto doesn't answer: Why has this hurricane season been so quiet? He rounded up the usual suspects and reports that "meteorologists credit luck, shifts in the high-altitude jet stream, and African winds and dust."
But a quiet early season does not predict a calm later in the season, Borenstein writes. "People shouldn't let their guard down because several past seasons have started off slow and ended quite busy and deadly — 1967, 1984, 1988, 1994 and 2002," Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with the private firm Weather Bell, told him.
Hurricane season runs from June through the end of November. And as investment advisers like to say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
-Paul Raeburn
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