SEASON'S PREDICTIONS CONSTITUTE BEST ESTIMATE OF ACTIVITY

Predictions have started rolling in for the upcoming hurricane season and it looks like 2018 will be another busy year - though not quite as brutal as the last one.

On Thursday, the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project team released its annual predictions for the hurricane season that runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

The forecast is for 14 named storms, seven of whichthey predict it predicts will become hurricanes and three that will reach Category 3 or greater with winds of 111 mph or more, according to a Thursday news release.

The 2017 hurricane season produced a total of 17 named storms, making it the most active since the 2005 season in which Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Josh Lichter, a National Weather Service meteorologist in the Houston/Galveston Weather Forecast Office, said Colorado State's forecast should not incite panic among Texans who have Hurricane Harvey fresh on their minds.

"I would not, seeing ...a forecast months and months ahead of time, use it as a decision of whether or not I would want to prepare a little heavier or a little more than normal," Lichter said.

This early, he said, the predictions are changing.

The Weather Channel reports that the 30-year hurricane season average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and two hurricanes that reach a Category 3 or stronger and Colorado State is predicting "that 2018 hurricane activity will be about 135 percent of the average season."

"By comparison, 2017's hurricane activity was about 245 percent of the average season," the release states.

Ten storms became hurricanes in 2017, including six that were Category 3 or above. It also brought the first two major hurricanes to hit the continental United States in 12 years, Harvey and Irma, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

There have been years in the pastwhere an active season was forecast and nothing happened in Texas, Lichter said. Other years, an inactive season was predicted and one storm caused absolute devastation.

For example, the Colorado team predicted at this time last year that 2017 would bring a below-average hurricane season. That prediction proved low given the 17 storms, including Harvey in Texas, Maria in Puerto Rico, and Irma in the southeastern states and the Caribbean.

"The CSU forecast is intended to provide a best estimate of activity to be experienced during the upcoming season - not an exact measure," both the 2017 and 2018 releases said.

But that's why it's important to prepare: it only takes one storm, Lichter said.

"Now is a good time to have a plan, to develop a plan for the season for what you and your family and your business would do if we were to get a system that would approach the upper Texas coast and pose a threat to the area," he said.

Residents should visit www.flash.org/hurricanestrong, he continued, to help with the creation of such a plan. The site walks residents through building a disaster response kit, finding the nearest evacuation area, making sure insurance is up to date and hardening homes against heavy wind and rain.

This is the 35th year Colorado researchers have released hurricane predictions. Their data is based on more than 60 years of historical information that includes ocean surface temperatures and level pressures as well as water warming in central and eastern tropical Pacific, commonly referred to as El Niño.

For 2018, Colorado researchers say there is a 38 percent probability a major hurricane will make landfall along the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville - a number that jumps to 63 percent for the entire Atlantic coastline.

As storms develop this year, like every other year, they will be given names from a list maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. There are 21 names available each year and those lists are recycled every six years. The names of deadly or costly storms are retired. Some examples of retired names are Carla (1961), Beaulah (1967), Alicia (1983), Katrina (2005), and Harvey (2017). A list of retired names can be found at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml.

If there are more than 21 tropical cyclones in the Atlantic in a year, additional storm names are taken from the Greek alphabet. This happened in 2005, the same year Hurricane Katrina battered Louisiana.

Named storms ran out in October with Wilma. Instead of the hurricane season running from June 1 to Nov. 30, Tropical Storm Zeta (six letters into the Greek alphabet) formed Dec. 30, 2005, and finally dissipated Jan. 6 of the next year.

Both the National Weather Service and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center will release their forecasts next month. Colorado researchers will update their predictions May 31, July 2 and Aug. 2, the release states.

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