It's Still There!

This fear-flogging article about hurricane forecasts (recommended by Drudge, of course) made me laugh my head off! Apparently the stealth factor regarding where North Atlantic hurricanes go is the Bermuda High Pressure System:

And, perhaps most worrisome for Florida, the Bermuda High still lurks in the western Atlantic.

Well, but of course, that's where it belongs. The Bermuda High is but one of several, semi-permanent sub-tropical highs girdling the globe, a surface expression of Hadley Cell circulation within the Earth's atmosphere. Being surprised at the existence of the Bermuda High is like being surprised at the existence of the Atlantic Ocean. You wake up every morning in Miami, look east, and say: "DAMN! That water is STILL there!"

But reading further, it's not so much the existence of the Bermuda High:

The high is somewhat mysterious, a clockwise-swirling ridge of high pressure that wobbles back and forth across the Atlantic, strengthening and weakening, in response to weather patterns over Iceland and the Azores islands near Portugal. Sometimes it's in the western Atlantic near Bermuda — hence the name.

but rather its location in the western Atlantic, that is the issue:

Guess what? The Bermuda High is still in roughly the same place, according to the National Weather Service.

If the high lingers there through the summer and fall, Florida could be nature's punching bag for yet another hurricane season.

Experts say it's too far soon to tell whether that dire scenario will occur. But it's not too soon to prepare for it.

"If in fact the subtropical (Bermuda) High is going to be more frequently positioned farther south and west like it was in 2004, then one clearly has to be concerned," said James Elsner, a Florida State University hurricane researcher.

Jim Lushine, a meteorologist for the weather service's Miami office, offered one hint to watch for: If May is unusually dry, as it was last year, that could be evidence that the high is still lingering — and an omen of bad things to come.

"I'm not saying we'll have four hurricanes in one year," he said. Then again, "I wouldn't be shocked if we had six."

Others cautioned that the high's behavior was just one of many weird occurrences in 2004, a year so off-the-wall bizarre that a hurricane hit Brazil — in March. (The storm, unofficially named Catarina, was the first hurricane in at least four decades in the South Atlantic.) The Earth's climate is so complex that scientists don't understand everything that goes into creating a vicious hurricane season.

I was really surprised that Brazil doesn't see more hurricanes in March (late summer), and I was surprised that everyone, especially the Brazilians, were surprised (guess the Earth is stranger than we think). But the Bermuda High has gotta be somewhere, and the western North Atlantic is just as good a place as any. But then the article goes off the deep end again:

Forecasters confess they don't have an easy way to gauge the high's behavior.

"We don't know why it's there or how long it's going to be there," Lushine said after the weather service issued a bulletin Feb. 2 blaming the strong Bermuda High for four months of record-dry weather in Palm Beach County. "It's not anything we keep track of."

Lushine added that the high has remained strong and stayed, on average, in the same general area since March. The weather service doesn't have detailed records on its location before then, he said. The high can shift dramatically from day to day, in response to cold fronts and other disturbances.

The high also can stick around the same neighborhood for thousands of years — with vast consequences for the hurricanes spinning toward Florida.

During a 2,800-year stretch ending around 1000 A.D., the Bermuda High seemed to linger near Haiti, said Kam-biu Liu, a geography professor at Louisiana State University who studies prehistoric sediments for clues about past climate conditions. That era was also a "hyperactive" period in which catastrophic hurricanes struck Florida and the Gulf Coast three to five times more often than today, Liu said.

During the past millennium, he said, Florida has enjoyed a quiet period — although that quiet included Andrew in '92 and the 1928 storm that killed more than 3,000 people near Belle Glade.

Here's the scary part: The Bermuda High could easily move back toward Haiti, giving Floridians another thousand or so years of blue tarps.

"We don't know how much longer this quiet period will last," Liu said. "That's the biggest lesson: We haven't seen anything yet."

Why would the Bermuda High find itself around Haiti? No reason for it to be there, as far as I can tell. But wondering about the climate was not the reason why the article was written. The real reason?

Be afraid! Be very afraid! Even now, the Bermuda High is wobbling between the Azores and Bermuda, like it has done since just about the dawn of time. BE AFRAID!