While the Atlantic hurricane season doesn’t officially begin until June 1, the FOX Forecast Center will be monitoring the Caribbean Sea during the second half of May for any signs of preseason development.
Computer model forecasts suggest a broad area of low pressure could develop in the vicinity of Central America by late next week and into the following weekend.
“There is consensus among the various computer model forecasts that a broad area of low pressure will develop from the Pacific across Central America to Colombia,” FOX Weather Hurricane Specialist Bryan Norcross said.
Any potential tropical threat could be linked to a phenomenon known as the Central American Gyre, which has historically contributed to tropical storm formation in the Caribbean or the Gulf in late spring or early fall.
The gyre is a sprawling area of low pressure that feeds off moisture streaming in from the Pacific Ocean and forms near or over Central America.
At its core, it is a heavy rain producer with impacts extending outwards hundreds of miles and leading to threats of torrential rainfall, flooding, and landslides for more than a dozen countries in and around Central America.
In some cases, organized low-pressure centers can develop within the large gyre if water temperatures and upper-level winds become favorable for tropical development.
Both early and late in the hurricane season – or sometimes even before and after the official six-month season – are the periods most notorious for allowing a tropical disturbance to break away from Central America and form into a tropical depression or storm in either the Eastern Pacific, Bay of Campeche (southwestern Gulf) or western Caribbean Sea.
However, Norcross cautioned that the odds of any system tracking north or northeastward into the southern Gulf as a tropical depression or storm are low.
“The GFS (American model) is an outlier in pulling an organized system north into the Caribbean and developing a tropical low in the Pacific,” he said. “We have seen this kind of over-eager development in the long-range time periods by the GFS many times, so it’s best to ignore it without any support from the conventional models or the new artificial intelligence (AI) models.”
Preseason tropical development happened in 8 of the past 10 hurricane seasons
June 1 marks the official start date for the Atlantic hurricane season, but tropical cyclones can occasionally develop before then. The most favored areas for tropical development in May are the western Caribbean Sea, the Gulf, and near the southeastern U.S. coast.
Since 1851, 43 systems of at least tropical storm intensity (sustained winds of 39 mph or higher) have developed in the Atlantic Basin between Jan. 1 and May 31, according to NOAA’s historical hurricane tracks database. That’s an average of approximately one preseason tropical cyclone every four years.
Most recently, an unnamed subtropical storm in January 2023 kicked off that year’s Atlantic hurricane season, the National Hurricane Center determined in a May 2023 reassessment of the storm.
Before that, there was a seven-year stretch between 2015 and 2021 in which at least one tropical storm or hurricane developed in the Atlantic before June 1.
That means only the 2022 and 2024 hurricane seasons haven’t spawned a preseason storm over the past decade.
2025 Atlantic hurricane season expected to be another busy one
Early outlooks for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season suggest another above-average season is on the way, so any tropical development before June would likely only boost forecasters’ confidence in their sobering predictions.
In an outlook released on April 3, the team of tropical experts at Colorado State University (CSU) called for 17 named storms, nine of which are expected to become hurricanes. Four of those hurricanes could reach major status, with winds of at least 111 mph (Category 3 or higher).
These predictions from CSU are above the 30-year average of 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes.
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