Forecasters predict an above average 2006 storm season this year with perhaps not quite the punch of last year's record activity.

The Colorado State University forecast team said Tuesday that the U.S. Atlantic Basin will experience an active storm season this year, but most likely with fewer intense landfalling hurricanes than last year, the costliest period ever for insurers.

Colorado State Professor William Gray said he expects the current period of major Atlantic hurricane activity to continue for another 15-to-20 years. “But it is statistically unlikely that the coming 2006-2007 hurricane season, or the seasons that follow, will have the number of major U.S. hurricane landfall events we have seen in 2004-2005,” he said.

The team's forecast for 2006 anticipates 17 named storms forming in the Atlantic Basin between June 1 and Nov. 30. Nine of the 17 storms are predicted to become hurricanes, and of those, five are expected to develop into intense or major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 mph.

Other groups see much the same thing.

Weather experts at the Tropical Storm Risk forecasting consortium led by Benfield Hazard Research Center of London predict Atlantic basin and U.S. landfalling tropical cyclone activity to be about 50 percent above the 1950-2005 norm in 2006.

Professor Mark Saunders of TSR said that predictions of trade wind speed over the Caribbean and North Atlantic and sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic indicate stronger hurricane activity.

Mr. Gray said that what made the 2004 and 2005 seasons so unusually destructive was the high percentage of major hurricanes that moved over the U.S. coastline, which was caused primarily by the “favorable broad-scale Atlantic upper-air steering currents that were present the last two seasons.”

The Colorado team expects continued warm tropical and north Atlantic sea surface temperatures that have been prevalent in most years since 1995. Combined with neutral or weak La Nina conditions, what can be expected is greatly enhanced Atlantic basin hurricane activity, they said.

Mr. Gray does not attribute the changes in projected Atlantic hurricane activity to global warming. “Seasonal and monthly variations of sea surface temperature with individual storm basins show only very low correlations with monthly, seasonal and yearly variations of hurricane activity,” Mr. Gray said.

Special Reports /

Forecasters Expect Above Average Storm Season

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