The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season concluded with the dissipation of tropical storm Sara over the Yucatan of Mexico middle of November. Since then, I’m sure the tropics have been at the furthest back portions of your mind!
But... we’re already just under four months till the commencement of the 2025 season. Now that we’ve had the first couple of days of February go by, we have all our latest seasonal climate data to digest and dissect together.
The trends are already looking very interesting.
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First and foremost, it still appears the upcoming season is going to look VERY different than the last.
We are likely not going to see a ton of development inside the Gulf or the Caribbean, but some cruisers are still possible despite what our pressure pattern could do across the Atlantic basin.
Some of this will have to boil down to watching trends in real-time, especially since our seasonal models tend to struggle with ENSO. The El Niño versus La Niña forecast is already a point of contention across our big-league climate models.
The latest ECMWF data through the month of August suggests we will start climbing out of La Niña and back into El Niño once again. This will have implications on the season as well as our weather here in central Florida during the summer and fall.
The Canadian CANSIPS and the Climate Forecast System however still suggest we will float back to a neutral ENSO, which creates a level playing field for the Atlantic to develop storms however it sees fit pending other intra-seasonal puzzle pieces.
We’re also still monitoring SST anomaly trends, or how much warmer or cooler ocean waters are compared to their seasonal norm. All of our models suggest a large dome of warm anomalies centered across the Subtropical Atlantic.
This could derail focusing stability in the tropics themselves, especially off the coast of Africa where our tropical waves typically plop offshore and start heading west. A warmer pocket of waters at a higher latitude could also weaken our Bermuda-Azores high, and lead to less of a generally westward path for our long-track tropical waves.
Good news for us! Bad news for the Caribbean Sea.
So far, our early theories of the Eastern United States being a prime spot to watch our holding into February. The seasonal ECMWF seems to believe we should expect above-average tropical cyclone activity right off the Florida east coast and into the Carolinas.
The key takeaway from looking through the scope this far away from the start of our next tropical season; the next two or so months will be PIVOTAL in dialing in a general expectation for what Floridians and the rest of the coastal U.S. can expect. There are multiple moving pieces to investigate and monitor over the coming months, which is precisely why I love to bring these discussions to you all so you can follow along.
As we get into April and May we will start breaking down forecast data at a greater level versus simply watching month-to-month changes.
For now, we have our early theories and some are staying consistent since we first began our analysis back in December.
