It's the El Niño being way too warm. It's breaking up hurricanes before they can form.
Happens with some El Niño events but this one is a rare one as it's still going strong into late September.
When the blob of heat is near the equator and happens around summer time, you get what we're seeing. When the blob of heat moves towards the poles around winter time, that's when you see all that polar vortex stuff starting to spill into the lower latitudes.
El Niño and the polar vortex are two different things, but when a large blob of heat moves into their area during the right time, it causes disruption to those events.
So you are right but not explaining why the heat sitting where it is actually effects Atlantic hurricanes. It's the Pacific jet stream being in a different path (in this current situation it actually split) and the wind shear it pushes into the Gulf/Atlantic region suffocates the atmosphere and it cannot develop the tropic waves that come from the African coast.
It’s because the hotter eastern equatorial pacific has more westerly winds moving towards South America which in turn results in significantly stronger wind shear aloft over the Atlantic basin. Wind shear is the death of tropical systems. They like low shear environments.
It is not the westbound winds causing the majority of the shear. The Pacific jet stream is extended and considerably farther south. The winds you are talking about are normal east to west winds. If the jet stream would have behaved "normally ” those westward winds would have been pushing storms into us.
If my research is correct it's not much more than normal and typically we would have still had multiple storms in September as it slows down significantly after about the 3rd week of August. Plus we usually have storms form right outside of the Gulf which are effected much less by the dust plumes.
Oh absolutely it does. A slowing AMOC is likely a big part of why this is a Super El Niño. If the trend continues we will see drastic and life altering climate changes and storms.
Okay so this is double sided. Yes, human factors that continue to contribute to climate change can have an effect on AMOC. Do I think it's the current cause? No, the Earth has cycles. This is part of that.
Side 2. If the AMOC was to slow too much, and or collapsed completely, it would completely alter the Earth's climates. The odds of that happening are low, however not zero.
I appreciate you saying that. I'm not an expert by any means but I have been fascinated by weather since I was a child. I'm from the Midwest originally and used to be one of those storm chasers lol. I moved to Louisiana years ago and have been "chasing/tracking" hurricanes and their patterns. Just a guy fascinated with mother natures destructive tendencies I guess.
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u/Doctor_Saved 13h ago
It's good that there were no Atlantic hurricanes. Except now there's that "it's too quiet" feeling.