Experts Forecast a Busy Hurricane Season

Disaster planners at the National Hurricane Center warned Monday that “a very active hurricane season is looming” and outlined a beefed-up system for tracking storms and helping people in their paths.

After last year’s record-shattering storm spree, a new tracking center has been put in service, another weather satellite launched, more forecasters hired and the volume of emergency relief supplies at the ready has been tripled.

Though the season that begins June 1 isn’t expected to be as ferocious as last year’s, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculate that 13 to 16 named storms will form over the North Atlantic over the next six months. Eight to 10 of them are predicted to be hurricanes, of which four to six will be Category 3 or higher, meaning sustained winds upward of 111 mph.

“The ultimate question is whether storms will make landfall. But that can’t be predicted this far in advance,” said retired Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., NOAA administrator, adding that based on recent experience it was “statistically within reason that two to four hurricanes could affect the United States.”

A record 28 named storms walloped the region last year, including 15 hurricanes, four of which struck the U.S. Southeast, devastating New Orleans and vast swaths along the Gulf of Mexico and Florida’s Atlantic coastline.

Still, the frequency and intensity of storms predicted for June through November exceed average annual activity, based on the last 40 years of hurricane tracking. On average, 11 named storms form each year, with six becoming hurricanes, two of them major.

Federal, state and local officials on hand at the National Hurricane Center to unveil this year’s forecast urged the millions living in the most hurricane-prone areas to be prepared for the worst.

“Remember, it only takes one hurricane in your neighborhood to have a bad hurricane season,” Lautenbacher said.

The North Atlantic is in the midst of a “multi-decadal signal,” a climate pattern favorable to hurricane formation and likely to last another 10 or 20 years, said Max Mayfield, hurricane center chief and the now-familiar face of the storm season.

The climate pattern involves a confluence of conditions in the ocean and atmosphere, with warmer sea surface temperatures fueling storms while weaker-than-usual wind shear allows them to gather force rather than break up as they travel westward, said Gerry Bell, hurricane outlook lead meteorologist.

Scientists are at odds over whether global warming has been a factor in the rising frequency and severity of hurricanes.

Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor and author of a Nature magazine analysis last year that linked warming waters with storm intensity, sees “a rather spectacular correlation between sea surface temperatures and aggregate hurricane occurrence.”

But Stanley B. Goldenberg, a NOAA research meteorologist who helped compose this year’s forecast, contends that the modest rise in water temperature over the last few decades doesn’t explain the doubling of Category 4 and 5 storms since 1970.

After last year’s disasters, federal funding for hurricane forecasting and research skyrocketed. A $300-million budget for tropical storm work, $109 million more than last year, is awaiting President Bush’s signature, Lautenbacher said.

The NOAA also has acquired a link with Europe’s main weather satellite to get images from the far eastern Atlantic, where storms tend to form. A new satellite downlink center in Washington to capture and analyze photos has been established, a new geostationary satellite has been deployed and four more forecasters have been hired at the hurricane center, a sturdy concrete bastion 20 miles inland.

With visions of the chaotic response to Hurricane Katrina still in their heads, officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency have stocked up on food and water and pre-positioned those supplies in the most vulnerable areas to get help to the needy faster, said R. David Paulison, acting director of the agency scorned by Congress as well as storm victims for an ineffectual response after Katrina.

“What we’ve been doing at FEMA is fixing those things we saw didn’t work well in Katrina -- logistics, having the right things in the right places at the right time,” Paulison said. “We did not do that in Katrina.”

Paulison, who has spent his career in emergency service, including as Miami fire chief during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, was named to replace FEMA Director Michael D. Brown after the Katrina debacle, when the agency failed to get supplies into stricken New Orleans and Brown wasn’t aware that thousands were stranded in the city center without food or water.

FEMA has invested heavily in satellite and other communications for rescue and relief operations, Paulison said, to improve “situational awareness” so the federal agency can better coordinate with firefighters, emergency medics and local law enforcement who are the first to respond to a disaster.

Those gathered for the annual forecast warned that predicting the frequency, path and intensity of a hurricane remains more art than science. Last year, NOAA experts predicted 12 to 15 tropical storms, seven to nine of them becoming hurricanes -- a less intensive season than they are forecasting for this year.

Times staff writer Willem Marx in Washington contributed to this report.