Sept. 9, 2004

Our (Dr. William Gray, Philip J. Klotzbach and William Thorson) new September-only forecast calls for five named storms, three hurricanes, two major hurricanes and NTC activity of 85 which is much above the mean September-only average value of 48. This high September NTC is partly an extrapolation of the current September statistics being generated by major Hurricane Frances.

Our October-only forecast calls for three named storms, one hurricane, and no major hurricanes and NTC activity of 15 which is below the mean October average (18). These lower October values are due to the very warm equatorial sea surface conditions in the central Pacific (Niño 4 and Niño 3.4).

We anticipate that the 2004 Atlantic basin tropical cyclone (TC) season will be higher than the full season activity we anticipated in our early December, early April, late May and early August update forecasts. We expect this to be the eighth of the last 10 seasons that have had hurricane activity much above the last 55 year average and particularly the suppressed activity of the quarter-century period of 1970-1994.

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DEYO NOTE: To see the significance of this forecast, compare the numbers in parentheses in the first column for the ANNUAL AVERAGE number of hurricanes, to the last column to see how much higher is the forecast for 2004.

http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/2004/sep2004/