Hurricane Season Still Looks Busy This Year

For the flood-weary eastern half of the United States, this can't be good news.

The Atlantic hurricane season is still expected to be busy this year.

Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005.
It looks like this year will be another busy hurricane season  

I say that's bad for the water-logged East because hurricanes moving inland drop huge amounts of rain, often long after the strong winds from the storm subside.

Ex-hurricanes can wander far inland into the Southeast, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys and interior New England, among other places.

With the ground soaked in many of these locations, many inches of rain from a hurricane or former hurricane can really spell trouble.

Just ask people in Vermont who suffered a huge flood after dying Hurricane Irene dumped heavy rain on an already soggy state in 2011. The resulting flood was monstrous.

We've already had four tropical storms in the Atlantic this year, though fortunately none of them have amounted to too much.  With ocean water temperatures above normal and rather favorable wind patterns, it seems likely there will be quite a few tropical storms and hurricanes.

The tropics have been quiet for the past week or so because a huge amount of dust from sand storms in the Sahara blew out into the Atlantic Ocean and crossed over all the way to South America and the Caribbean.  This is normal and happens from time to time. The dust suppresses  the formation of tropical storms.

But imagine standing there in Miami and breathing a bit of dust that had been stepped on by a camel in Morocco a couple weeks earlier.  It can happen.

Anyway, the dust is subsiding. And though hurricane seasons starts June 1, it really gets going in earnest around mid-August and reaches a peak during September.

There are already signs there might be some tropical storms wanting to form next week. God knows where they might end up, but if there's a bunch of them over the next several weeks, it stands to reason at least one or two would hit the United States.

All we can do is hope that doesn't happen.