FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Just what weather-weary Florida does not need to hear: Next year’s hurricane season will be another busy and blustery one, long-range storm forecasters said Friday.

But there is a silver lining to the dark prognostications from William Gray and his fellow atmospheric scientists at Colorado State University: While plenty of storms are predicted, they should not be as fierce or strike land as frequently as the quartet of hurricanes that swept across Florida in August and September.

Gray, who studies past weather patterns to predict future ones, has been issuing annual storm counts for more than 20 years. For the 2005 hurricane season, from June 1 to Nov. 30, he foresees 11 named storms, with six developing into hurricanes. Three of those six are expected to become major hurricanes, with winds of more than 111 mph.

“We’re in a new era, and the probabilities of landfall are higher than the average for this coming year,” Gray said from Fort Collins, Colo. “We’re in an era like we were in the 1940s and 1950s, when Florida got hit with a lot more storms.”

Gray and other forecasters say a natural cycle of warmer water in the Atlantic Basin will spawn more hurricanes over the next 20 or even 30 years. The last such period was in the mid-20th century.

Indeed, the season that concluded Tuesday saw 15 named storms, nine hurricanes and six major hurricanes. In a six-week span, four hurricanes – Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne – slammed across both Florida coasts and the Panhandle, ultimately causing the deaths of 117 residents and $60 billion in damage. Gray had predicted 13 named storms and seven hurricanes in his forecast last December.

“It certainly seems like we’re in this active period, and that’s probably not good news for the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center west of Miami.

But Mayfield said the statistics do not tell the whole story. “It’s not about the numbers, it’s where the hurricanes make landfall and how strong they make landfall,” he said.

Copy the Story Link