Once the cyclone emerged off the North Carolina coast, it evolved, as predicted, from a tropical storm – which derives its energy from warm ocean water below it – into an extratropical cyclone, a cold-core storm that gets its energy from the atmospheric interaction between warm and cool air masses. Sometimes, like this year, the Atlantic is quite quiet during the actual peak.
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Earlier this week the FMRE http://tinyurl.com/MexicoFMRE (Federaci’n Mexicana de Radioexperimentadores) Emergency Communication Net activated as Hurricane Newton approached the Baja California peninsula. By late August and the first half of September, a lot of heat has built up in the oceans, and hurricanes are nature’s way of moving some of that excess heat from the tropics northward.
Hurricane Newton was one of those rare storms that formed off the Pacific and made the turn north. In the right conditions, these storms can gather together and begin to rotate in an organized cluster. This system is projected to move across the southern Gulf of Mexico over the next week. Basically, it wasn’t windy enough to be called a tropical storm when it crossed into Arizona.
The storm was not a significant rainmaker, although the potential for scattered showers remained in the forecast until Thursday.
In New Jersey, big waves pushed water up to the base of dunes in some areas of the state hit hard by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012, including Point Pleasant Beach, Bay Head, Mantoloking and Brick. The storm did most of its damage as a category 1 hurricane, after making landfall along Florida’s northern Gulf Coast.
Hurricanes have struck almost all parts of the New England coastline over the past century.
There are several areas of the Atlantic that may see development in the coming week.
Vertical wind shear, or the change in wind speed with height in the atmosphere, takes the oomph out of a building hurricane by transporting heat and moisture from its center and by tilting its vortex, which makes it less efficient at generating heat, according to Weather Underground.
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The average number of named storms we have each hurricane season is 12, so we are still below average.
