Hurricane Season Begins

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:02]Good morning to you. Mark South with Hurricane Track here. It's Monday now, the first day of June 2026. Coming to you from Cheyenne, Wyoming, as I'm continuing my work with the Mississippi State University crew out here in the Great Plains, studying how severe weather forms and impacts our lives. But it is June 1st. That means it is hurricane season for the next 6 months.

[00:00:26]That is a lot more about what we will be focused on for obvious reasons. We are hurricane track. So look, the headline there, it is absolutely true. I think we're going to have a season unlike anything that we have seen since 2015.

[00:00:40]And I'll do my best to explain that to you, the reasoning behind why I've said that here throughout the rest of this video. So again, thanks for uh tuning into it, and let's get started. Let's move me out of the way just enough so I can get to my tabs up here. here. So, we'll get rid of the thumbnail and we'll first start out with a little bit of climatology. This is a really neat interactive map that is available on the hurricane track insider site. So, for any of you uh that are our patrons out there at the $10 level or higher, remember you have access to all of this.

[00:01:13]This was put together by one of our supporters, a gentleman in Bermuda. So, let's look over here June 1st through the 10th. These are the points of origin where tropical storms and hurricanes got their start going all the way back to 1851.

[00:01:28]So that's pretty remarkable data. And you can see a big clustering here overall in the Western Caribbean. Let's use a little bit better outline here.

[00:01:37]There we go. That's what we're looking for. This is why we look to this area this time of year. All right. We don't have anything that forms way out in the deep tropics. Really nothing out here in the subtropical Atlantic. Most of the activity is going to be in and around the Caribbean Sea, maybe going into the Gulf. And then of course the Eastern Pacific, southwest of the coast of Mexico. Also a climatologically favored area for development as we move through the month of June. Let's just add the next 10 days. So we're now, you know, your fractions 2/3 of the way through June. There we go. more activity including a few areas now that did develop east of the Lesser Antilles out this way. So you never know. Might have to watch out there at some point. And then finally the last third of June, the last 10 days overall you see that June can be pretty busy. Lots of dots on there, but notice most of them especially in the Atlantic basin occurring well to the west of 60° longitude. So they're in the western part of the basin, Caribbean, Gulf, right off the southeast coast. Some of those are from old frontal boundaries and whatnot. So this is the area that we generally watch for the month of June typically. We'll see what this year brings. Eastpack very densely clustered here to the south of Mexico. And in fact, we do have some action there to talk about and we'll do that as we go forward. All right, next topic, the seasonal forecasts. Are these useful?

[00:03:10]Well, that's a whole different discussion which we will tackle on our talking weather show summer edition which will resume next week. We'll talk about that when we wrap things up here.

[00:03:21]Okay. So, we do have a bunch of seasonal forecasts from a bunch of different agencies, private, government, and otherwise. All right. I listed a bunch here with the help of generative AI.

[00:03:33]What an amazing set of tools we have at our fingertips. Noah, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Colorado State, TSR out of England. Um, you have Acue and then Weather Bell Analytics.

[00:03:46]And then finally, I threw one on here.

[00:03:48]And remember, there are a lot, but we don't have an hour to talk about this stuff today. Excuse me. I got the just getting up throat issues. North Carolina State University. So looking at the graphic, the overall consensus from just these groups here, and remember there are a lot 14 name storms total. Out of those about half become hurricanes, and not quite half of those become category 3 or higher. And I don't have it charted on here, but most of the thinking is that the ACE score, the accumulated cyclone energy, in other words, the quality of the storms, how strong they are, and how long they last, probably won't be very high this year because of the growing El Nino that we're going to discuss here. But overall, um, a slightly below average season in terms of the numbers. But you know what? This tells us absolutely buttkiss about impacts. Nothing doesn't tell us about impacts at all, where anybody could be impacted, what the impacts may be. We're going to have to just wait and see on those things. Okay. So, get to know these names. I don't know how many of them we will actually use. We nobody knows for sure. Let's shrink the graphic there so that it fits better. Arthur all the way down to Wilfred. I doubt we get that far. Seriously, maybe we get to Fay and Gonzalo. Maybe Hannah. We'll see.

[00:05:13]Remember Isaas? We're using the same names from 2020 and that's pronounced Isaas. Uh, we'll have to see. So, this is the 2026 Atlantic hurricane tropical storms and hurricane names. Hopefully, we don't get anything jumping directly to hurricane intensity, but just in case, there they all are. Get to know them. We shall see how many we use up.

[00:05:36]So, the main source of information is the National Hurricane Center, part of the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And they have a terrific website. Lots of great info here. I'm starting to wonder why even have people like me when you've got these great folks down here. Their social media stuff, they are really upping their game and I highly encourage you to take advantage of it. Look, they're even in the vertical format. For everybody that likes to watch stuff in the nonlandscape format, but they have done a terrific job. There's a lot of good video material on here. You should take advantage of that. So, our information will come from the National Hurricane Center first and foremost. That being said, there's lots of websites just like we have where we can embed their graphics and include them in a nice scrollable fashion. you know that uh Mike Boland's weather page there, the spaghetti models and um all the work that he does, he's got a terrific page for that. There's lots of others out there and we have a similar thing where everything's right there at your fingertips. So, that being said, uh nothing over the next 7 days in the Atlantic basin, so that's good. The at uh Pacific, the East Pack, two areas to watch here. One that has a pretty high chance of developing, the other here south of Mexico, low chance. And that's what these colors mean. Your yellow, your orange, your red. And uh this system out here, in case you're wondering. Let's get a good color that will pop. Let's use that orange there. I think that'll do nicely. Uh even if this does develop, it should be short-lived.

[00:07:11]No threat to Hawaii. So, don't worry about that if you are in the Hawaiian Islands. All right, scrolling on down even more. The Central Pacific. Nope.

[00:07:20]Nothing out there either. And I think this is really cool that they have all of these graphics that you can see everything on their website and others at just a glance. Satellite view of the Atlantic basin. Want to point out a few things to you here. Uh very dry and dusty already through the Atlantic basin as a huge plume of very stable air up at about I think it's 700 millibars or so, a few thousand feet up. Very warm. It's capped. We talk about severe weather. We have a big blanket of warm dusty air from Africa all the way across into the Caribbean. I heard from my friend and good partner of the project, Brent from the Virgin Islands. A they have no power. Tim Olive also tuned in down there from St. Thomas. Brent is in St. John. No power for some strange reason.

[00:08:12]and big time saharin air layer very hazy already down there in the Caribbean, but we don't see any concentrated areas of showers and thunderstorms uh in this region. It's June 1st. We wouldn't expect to see much anyway, right? Really cool map here as well. A good graphic from the National Hurricane Center.

[00:08:32]Let's use this. What should we use here?

[00:08:35]I guess lot of different colors. Green uh monsoon trough. This is just your convergence area where air likes to come together. It's like a grape vine. And then along that grape vine, you've got these tropical waves. And they are kind of few and far between right now, but there's a few of them out there. We'll watch that over the coming weeks and months. And the monsoon trough, by the way, this will eventually kind of lift north and it gives it a more favorable orientation for those tropical waves to come off of Africa. These areas of vorticity, a little bit of spin in the atmosphere and uh some energy with that as well. Heat, you know, in the form of uh the energy that forms over Africa, all this up upward motion. And when they get over the ocean, sometimes they develop. We'll have to see how many of those do. So this year they're going to face a very hostile environment. All right, speaking of that and well, let's look at the East Pack first. This is the area that the National Hurricane Center is watching. Not very organized and again, we're not expecting it to do very much. And again, no threat to Hawaii whatsoever. So don't worry about that.

[00:09:43]Um, another look at the Atlantic basin.

[00:09:45]Just different ways we can view things here. Here's Africa. Speaking of the continent of Africa and its tropical wave generating machine, nothing out there to really speak of right now.

[00:09:55]Everything's at a low latitude. All that energy is riding fairly far to the south. So, we don't have to worry about anything developing. We don't wait we don't usually we have to wait until later in the season. Usually August 1st and beyond really the 20th of August.

[00:10:11]But anyway, uh this is a cool chart. I use this a lot in my updates. So, get used to seeing this quite often. the vorticity signature where we're trying to see if there's any area of spin concentrating when it's all spread out like this for example uh or even this out here very light areas of vorticity it's strung out the energy is strung out it's not bundled there's a little bit of bundling of energy here off the southeast coast but not enough to warrant any concern of course but this is a chart that we will use very often throughout the season to figure out remember this is like trying to solve a mystery before something even happens.

[00:10:49]And we're looking to see when we get tropical cyclones to form. And this vorticity chart is a very helpful tool in that quest. All right. Um I want to jump over to this graphic here cuz I've pulled the source material out from the Noah site. El Nino, I'm sure you've heard a lot about it in recent news.

[00:11:10]Definitely going to be a big factor this this season. the abnormal warming of the tropical Pacific out here and we are well underway. Some of these anomalies off the coast of South America already four to 5° C above normal. This big-time warming, to put it in very easy to understand terms, creates a lot of upward motion, rising air over the Pacific, convection, and then you get strong winds that spread out across the upper atmosphere into the Atlantic basin, and that creates shear. Let's get a color that we can see better that'll contrast more. There we go. that goes across into the Atlantic, especially the deep tropics, and that decapitates these tropical waves as they move into that strong westerly wind. So, El Nino is negative for Atlantic hurricane development. But, as you can imagine, with these extra warm water temperatures, it is a positive for a very busy season all the way throughout the entire Pacific. So, I think we're going to have a lot of tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific Basin this year, not so much in the Atlantic basin. And this has other implications as well for global weather patterns. A lot of people talking about it. One of the sources you're going to hear a lot from us, Ben Nol. And look, this new westerly wind burst that's coming in, strong westerly winds at the low levels of the atmosphere, strong relative to normal, um, helps to move that warm water from west to east. and you really strengthen that El Nino and we could be looking at one of the strongest that we have ever seen and that will really shape the global weather patterns over the coming months, including probably knocking down the Atlantic hurricane season. But again, you just don't know where's that one or two, where do they end up? Uh it could be the right place at the wrong time and all that stuff. We just don't know. But man, this El Nino is definitely going to be more and more something that we hear about over the coming months and a very strong El Nino at that. In fact, some of the charting here, this is the relative uh Nino index where it's relative to the background state and some of these numbers here, this is your ensemble mean from the CFS V2. We're getting up there at above 3 Celsius uh above the the norm. And that's we've never seen that before.

[00:13:36]Now, we're not there yet. It's just a forecast from some of the modeling here, but it is very aggressive and this will have huge implications, like I've said on global weather patterns and the Atlantic hurricane season. So, do we see anything out there? Not really. Let's take a look at some of the modeling here. And we use blue to highlight what I want you to pay attention to. This is the western part of the Atlantic basin.

[00:13:58]Why am I showing you this area? Because this is what we typically focus on this time of year. remember the uh points of origin chart. So there's that little bit of vorticity off the southeast coast.

[00:14:10]Absolutely nothing to watch vorticity-wise. And remember the vorticity is that lowle energy. It starts at the bottom. Then severe weather, we look from the top down. Is there upper level support to even get severe weather going? With tropics, I like to see, do we even have anything at the surface? And with the exception of this little bit of energy off the coast of the southeast, which is strung out.

[00:14:34]See that? It's all strung out there. No, we don't see anything. And over the next several days, just random areas of energy streaming off of South America.

[00:14:43]You can see that here. Uh, this energy comes off. Sometimes the GFS likes to grab it, bundle it up, and then send a hurricane towards Florida. We see that very often in the model, and it's usually 95% erroneous. nothing over the coming days. It looks like this is the GFS out to about a week and we really don't see anything to worry about. Maybe just a little bit of an impulse here uh off the coast of Florida that could pivot on shore and bring you all some much needed rainfall, but nothing tropical over the coming days. Looking at the East Pack and uh again out to the next week or so. Let's go back to the 6Z. This one doesn't have enough frames from the 12Z run. So, the Eastern Pacific, the main area we're watching out here. And as you watch and see how this vorticity evolves, yeah, it tries to bundle up a little bit pretty nicely there. You see that ball? That's what we look for. And that's the bundling of the energy. We go backwards, go forward, it consolidates all that energy, and then off it goes, and it finally dies away.

[00:15:46]And then more activity tries to develop over here near what we call the Gulf of Towanek off of Guatemala. and on the southeast Pacific side. So maybe some action closer to land areas as we go out in time. Uh this being How far out in time are we? Uh cuz I'm hiding everything. Let's just move me out of the way. So we're more than a week out at this point in time with whatever this is happening off the coast of Guatemala and vicinity. Bottom line, tropics not too busy right now as we would expect for the month of June. All right. So, you're more than likely watching this on our YouTube or our Patreon. Most of what we do with videos we do on YouTube. So, I want to make sure you're aware of all the different sources that we provide to you from the Hurricane Track community.

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[00:19:09]We'd love to have you. But just joining the Patreon and just following what we're doing on YouTube and sharing our work means the world to us. We have a great community and um we've done a lot over these 25 26 years. That is for sure. All right, so we start with Arthur. Where will we end up? We will wait and see and we'll all find out together. I will do these updates as often as I can when I'm on the road like I am now with MSU. Hard to know. Hard to know. Today we did have time, but once I get back in and we really lock it in for the season, these updates will be pretty much daily. All right. And they'll be a lot shorter. This is a big one today cuz we had a lot a lot to talk about as we introed the 2026 hurricane season. All right. So, let me get over here so I can prepare to exit as gracefully as I can.

[00:19:57]Again, good to have you with me. I appreciate you watching. Hopefully, you learned something. I am Mark Sudd.

[00:20:02]Always good to see you from the entire hurricane track community. Welcome and we will see you next time. Have a good rest of your Monday.