The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its forecast for this year’s Atlantic hurricane season on Thursday, saying it expected to see between 13 to 19 named storms this year. That would make this an above-average season, and most likely not as active as 2024 ended up being. An average Atlantic hurricane season has 14 named storms, including seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
Ken Graham, the director of NOAA’s National Weather Service said at a news conference on Thursday morning that the agency’s forecasters believed six to 10 of the named storms could become hurricanes, meaning they would include winds of at least 74 miles per hour. Those could include three to five major hurricanes — Category 3 or higher — with winds of at least 111 m.p.h.
According to NOAA, there is an 30 percent chance of a near-normal season and a 60 percent chance of an above-normal season, with a 10 percent chance of a below-normal season.
Even so, some experts are concerned that the current setup may resemble something closer to the 2017 season, the year of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. That year, the season reached the upper limit of its forecast, ending up with 17 named storms from a forecast of 11 to 17. More of those storms became major hurricanes than forecasters had originally expected.
The NOAA forecast on Thursday joins more than a dozen other recent projections from experts at universities, private companies and other government agencies who have predicted a more tempered hurricane season than last year’s, but still one that is average to slightly above average.
There are 21 entries on this year’s official list of storm names, from Andrea to Wendy. If that list is exhausted, the National Weather Service will move on to an alternative list of names, something it has had to do only twice in its history. One of those two instances was in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi, flooding New Orleans and setting off a new urgency for better hurricane forecasts.
Thursday’s announcement was made from New Orleans to honor the history of that storm and the importance of hurricane forecasts, which have improved since then.
But the National Weather Service and NOAA, its parent agency, have lost hundreds of employees to layoffs and retirements in recent months after the Department of Governmental Efficiency, the Trump administration’s initiative to downsize the federal work force, mandated they reduce staff.
That has left many people in hurricane-prone areas wondering how the season could unfold with much of the federal disaster mechanism left in tatters. Some weather offices have curtailed their traditional twice-daily weather balloon launches, which are meant to collect data from the atmosphere that helps feed forecasts and forecast models.
James Franklin, a meteorologist who retired from the National Hurricane Center in 2017, warned that just a little bit of missing data could be the difference between a successful forecast and an inaccurate one.
“The key for the forecast models is to keep all of the input data coming in,” agreed Phil Klotzbach, a researcher at Colorado State University, which issued a similar seasonal forecast last month. “If we were to suffer from significant reduction in weather balloon launches or buoy data, for example, that could curtail forecast skill. But at this point, we don’t really know how much input data we would lose.”
Vijay Tallapragada, a senior scientist with the environmental modeling center at NOAA, said it was “very hard” to estimate whether models have already been affected by the cuts. It could be months until forecasters know for sure if there has been degradation in the computer forecast models, other experts said.
There is solid consensus among scientists that hurricanes are becoming more powerful because of climate change. Although there might not be more named storms overall, the likelihood of major hurricanes is increasing.
The United States has had a Category 4 or 5 hurricane make landfall in six of the last eight years. That’s one of the highest frequencies in records dating back to 1851, said Adam Smith, who created and ran a federal database that tracked how many natural disasters caused more than $1 billion in damage. This month, NOAA shut the project down.
Historically, many of those disasters have been hurricanes. Last year, with combined damage over $100 billion, hurricanes Helene and Milton were responsible for more than half the total losses from Mr. Smith’s list.
Well before hurricane season, Mr. Smith said, this year was off to a record pace, largely because of the wildfires in Los Angeles in January.
Judson Jones is a meteorologist and reporter for The Times who forecasts and covers extreme weather.
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