Dan Rather
ONE OF your reporter's first big breaks came in covering a Gulf Coast hurricane. Hurricane Carla made landfall in mid-September 1961, between Port O'Connor and Port Lavaca, Texas. She was a huge and dangerous Category Five storm, with sustained winds of more than 150 mph while she was still out over the Gulf, and of 120 mph once she slammed into the Texas coast. As part of our Carla coverage for Houston's Channel 11, KHOU, we showed, for the first time, a radar image of a hurricane superimposed on a scale map. The picture of the monster storm, some 400 miles across, nearly filled the Gulf of Mexico.
Through the years, hurricanes, nature's most powerful storms, have remained a subject of fascination. And scores of hurricanes down the line, the memory of Carla still remains strong, particularly when a large and powerful hurricane is bearing in from the Gulf. Hurricane Dennis certainly fit that description, and though it was a fraction of the size and force of Carla, it did possess one outstanding feature that distinguished it from that hurricane and most others of note - it hit toward the beginning, rather than near the end, of the hurricane season, which extends from the start of June to the end of November.
One would, in fact, have to go back to June of 1957 - to Hurricane Audrey - to find the last time such a powerful Atlantic hurricane made landfall this early. And what that hurricane and Dennis also have in common is this: They both owed their early-season intensity to a meteorological phenomenon known as the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation, or ADO.
EL NIÑO
The ADO can be thought of as a distant cousin of the much-better-known El Niño. That is, both are periodic variations in sea-surface temperature, though they take place in different oceans, can overlap and are triggered by different mechanisms (and El Niño, by contrast, actually has the effect of suppressing hurricane formation in the Atlantic). As was the case in the 1950s, we are now in the midst of ADO's warm period. And warm ocean water is to a hurricane as gasolene is to a fire.
The water in the Gulf of Mexico is unusually warm right now, given the time of year, and so the potential exists for strong storms. Coming on the heels of the dramatic and destructive end to last year's hurricane season, the start to this season has already set records; with Emily now making its way through the Caribbean, this is the earliest we have ever seen five named storms in the Atlantic.
Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issues a hurricane-season forecast. This year's calls for a 70 per cent chance of above-normal hurricane activity, which translates into 12 to 15 named storms, with "the vast majority of the tropical storms and hurricanes in 2005 (forming) during August-October". So we're a third of the way to the maximum number of forecast storms, but we are still not close to the anticipated period of greatest storm activity. Words to give coastal residents pause.
And it might not only be the long-suffering residents of Florida and the Gulf Coast who need to worry this year. Experts are also saying that this year's big season could well include storms that travel farther than usual up the Eastern seaboard. So while the barrage of storms that battered Florida at the end of last year's season was a fluke, the current bumper crop of powerful hurricanes is not. For the foreseeable future, battening down the hatches could become a way of life - even in the early summer - for those who live along the Atlantic and the Gulf.
Dan Rather is a television broadcaster.
