Expert forecasts active 2010 hurricane season

LYNN – The East Coast could get slam-dunked by hurricanes this year if a report, released Friday by Joe Bastardi, chief long-range meteorologist and forecaster at the AccuWeather Hurricane Center in Pennsylvania, proves accurate.For Massachusetts residents past middle age, the prediction will likely stir memories of big storms that struck the region over the past three decades. Many will recall Hurricane Gloria that cut a swath of destruction across the state’s coastal counties on Sept. 27-28, 1985.Wind gusts during Gloria were recorded at 90 mph in New Bedford and a State Police barracks near Rehobeth clocked gusts to 120 mph.Coastal residents aren’t likely to forget Hurricane Bob in 1991, a category 2 storm with category 3 gusts. Bob still ranks among the most intense hurricanes to strike Massachusetts since 1938 and appears on the list of the top-25 most devastating storms of the 20th Century.In August 2005, the remnants of Hurricane Katrina dropped four inches of rain across Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Hurricane Noel hit coastal Massachusetts in November 2007, bringing gusts up to 89 mph and sustained winds of 59 mph. About 80,000 Massachusetts residents lost electrical power and coastal flooding was rampant. Last August, Hurricane Bill churned up the sea, causing heavy surf as it moved offshore.Dozens of tropical storms, some nearing the ferocity of a hurricane, found their way to Massachusetts the past 30 years, some like the No Name Storm doing as much damage. “This year has the chance to be an extreme season,” said Bastardi. “It is certainly much more like 2008 than 2009 as far as the overall threat to the United States’ East and Gulf coasts.”The hurricane forecast for the Atlantic Basin for 2010 will be more active with above-normal threats on the U.S. coastline, he said.Bastardi is forecasting seven landfalls. Five will be hurricanes and two or three of the hurricanes will be major landfalls for the U.S. The meteorologist is calling for 16 to 18 tropical storms in total, 15 of which would be in the western Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico and, as a result, a threat to land. In a typical season, there are about 11 named storms of which two to three will impact the coast of the United States.According to Bastardi, several factors shaped his forecast, including the rapidly weakening El Niño and warmer ocean temperatures in the typical Atlantic tropical breeding grounds, as compared to last year. He noted that tropical storms draw energy from warm water, while weakening trade winds reduce the amount of dry air injected into the tropics from Africa. Further, higher humidity levels provide additional upward motion in the air and fuel tropical storm development.Bastardi compared a number of years to the upcoming season in terms of storm set up, including 1964, 1995 and 1998, all of which impacted the U.S. Coast. In 1964, Hurricane Cleo struck southeast Florida near Miami as a category 2 storm and killed 217 people. Hurricane Opal made landfall in Pensacola, Fla. in 1995 as a category 3 storm affecting 200 miles of coastline and causing $3 billion in damage. In 1998, Hurricane Bonnie struck near Wilmington, N.C. as a borderline category 2 to category 3 storm causing significant harm to crops and $1 billion in damage.Bastardi had predicted in last year’s hurricane forecast that the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was a year far below the average, with 11 tropical depressions forming and only nine of those becoming tropical storms, the lowest number of named tropical storms or hurricanes since the 1997 season. The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1 and continues through Nov. 30. These dates were selected because 97 percent of hurricane activity occurs during this six-month period.