For more than four months, since this hurricane season began, the Atlantic has been eerily placid—a remarkable stretch without a single hurricane. That prolonged calm has been rudely interrupted by Hurricane Isaias, a Category 3 fastball that is bearing down on the Gulf Coast and is expected to make landfall this evening near the Alabama-Florida line. “I think we knew at some point we would likely have a hurricane,” Daniel Brown, the operations-division chief at the National Hurricane Center, told me.
Not to be outdone, the Pacific Ocean has two major storms brewing, including one, Hurricane Simon, that is expected to rapidly intensify into a Category 4 and slam into the coast of Mexico. A smaller one, Tropical Storm Rachel, is forecast to be felt as far north as Southern California. “It’s a busy day here,” Brown said.
This season’s dynamic—an unruffled Atlantic and a frothing Pacific—has been right out of the El Niño playbook and was predicted months ago. El Niños tend to generate opposing winds—low-altitude trade winds out of the east and higher-up westerlies—that tear apart Atlantic storms as they try to form and also keep them from gaining strength. This type of wind shear is affecting Hurricane Isaias now, Brown said, which means that the storm could weaken a little before it makes landfall.
But for the moment, it’s still whipping at 115 miles an hour, and the forecast warns of “life-threatening storm surge and devastating winds.” Coastal counties have ordered evacuations; the governors of Alabama and Florida are declaring emergencies; residents are scrambling through hurricane prep. Forecasters are projecting landfall on the stretch of coastline near Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. Once the storm moves inland, it’s expected to continue to cause problems and could knock out power across wide swaths of the Southeast. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said during a news conference that thousands of utility linemen and National Guardsmen are standing by. The Gulf Coast states know how to brace for this kind of storm, but they’ve had an unusually long reprieve from watching and waiting to see how bad the next one will be.
In the Pacific, by contrast, a Category 4 hurricane is almost par for the course this season. By this time of year, the Pacific has usually generated 13 storms potent enough to warrant their own name, Brown said. This year, we’re on number 19. This onrush of hurricanes has a great deal to do with the buildup of abnormally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific—which, at this point, are in certain areas more than 4 degrees Celsius warmer than usual. This warming gins up storm activity in that ocean; it’s been spinning up hurricanes and hurling them toward Hawaii for months. The storm swells have also eroded Southern California beaches and swamped homes, and they keep coming. Today, seawater flooded the streets of Balboa Peninsula, California, inundating cars and homes, well before Tropical Storm Rachel was anywhere close to arriving.
The coast of Mexico is at particular risk from Hurricane Simon, which is forecast to bring potentially dangerous flooding and landslides to coastal states such as Jalisco and Nayarit. Further north, on the Baja California peninsula, communities are still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Polo, which caused widespread flooding last month and displaced hundreds of people.
The storm scorecard in these oceans has only reinforced the notion that the world is in the midst of an unusually powerful El Niño. As I reported in August, key areas of the Pacific Ocean had already gotten hot enough to make this a “Super El Niño”; the experts I spoke with then were anticipating that the event could end up peaking at twice that amount of warming. If those trends hold, this could be the strongest El Niño ever recorded, and right now, “everything seems to be on track with this being a remarkable event,” Nick Novella, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told me.
This season has set a record already—this is the latest in the year that a hurricane has formed in the Atlantic at any time during the satellite era, since 1966. And it isn’t even close. “This record was broken by nearly a month,” Novella said. Normally, five Atlantic hurricanes form by the end of September. For residents of the Gulf Coast, these uneasy hours before Isaias makes landfall are the last moments of that quiet. Hopefully, the year’s first Atlantic storm will not change too dramatically how we remember this season of relative calm.
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