We have now reached rare territory for the Atlantic Basin due to the lack of hurricanes at this stage of the tropical season. In fact, this is the latest time without an Atlantic hurricane during the satellite era which began in 1966 and there is likelihood that one has to go all the way back to 1941 though confidence in the tracking of hurricanes is far less certain in the pre-satellite era. Having said that, an extremely quiet first half of the tropical season does not guarantee an uneventful second half…indeed, there are some signals that activity will pick up later this month.
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It is hard to believe that it was 25 years ago...a day that will never be forgotten...and the weather featured exceptionally clear, calm and sunny conditions across the Northeast US. A strong cold frontal system had pushed through the northeastern states on the previous night producing strong thunderstorms and paving the way for a spectacular weather day on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. The 11th of September happens to fall right around the climatological peak of the Atlantic Basin tropical season and indeed there was a hurricane, Erin, that sat just 500 miles off the coast of New York City and its wind circulation helped to play a role in the aftermath of events that unfolded on that day.
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A strong El Nino in the equatorial part of the Pacific Ocean can have several positive benefits including a typically quieter Atlantic Basin tropical season and this tranquil season is on the verge of making history. Indeed, if no hurricane develops in the Atlantic Ocean by Saturday, September 12th then this would be the latest time without one this late in the season in the satellite era which dates to 1966. There have been two prior tropical seasons in the satellite era with the first recorded hurricane happening on September 11th (Gustav in 2002 and Humberto in 2013) and while nothing is certain when it comes to the weather, this record appears all but certain with no development expected into the weekend. The climatological peak of the Atlantic Basin tropical season is right around the 10th of September and there is currently no activity whatsoever.
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In a movie filled with memorable quotes, one of the shortest and simplest might have been “It’s a Twister!”, but it was part of a tornado scene that is still considered to be a classic more than eight decades later. August 25, 1939 was the official release date of the “Wizard of Oz" which was the first movie to depict an authentic looking tornado using improbable “1930’s style” special effects. Through the decades, this all-time classic has inspired movie-watchers and “weather weenies” alike with the scene of a twister lifting Dorothy’s home into the sky over rural Kansas farm land.
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On Thursday, August 13th, big league baseball will return to the iconic Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa. The Philadelphia Phillies and Minnesota Twins will meet in the 3rd edition of the Field of Dreams game at one of the sport’s most memorable settings and this will be the first such game in four years. The classic baseball film was made in 1989, and the first Field of Dreams game was played in August 2021 between the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees which was followed by another game one year later between the Cincinnati Reds and Chicago Cubs.
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El Nino continues to intensify across the central Pacific Ocean with sea surface temperatures rising to their highest levels so far this summer season. In fact, the latest water temperatures in the region known as “3.4” are now more than two degrees above-normal which places this El Nino event into the “strong” category and, when all is said and done, it’ll likely rival the greats of recent history including 1982-1983, 1997-1998, and 2015-2016.
In comparison with the sea surface temperatures anomalies for the full month of July with the El Nino episode of 2015-2016, many similarities appear on the maps. This specific comparison will be interesting to follow in coming months to determine if 2015-2016 could be used as an analog year for the upcoming winter outlook and provide us with some clues as to what we might expect late this year and early next year. Interestingly, the last blizzard that produced 2 feet of snow all along the DC-to-Philly-to-NYC corridor took place in late January of 2016 during the late stages of that El Nino event.
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It was quite a scare when first discovered in 2004, but thousands of observations later, we now know that the asteroid known as Apophis will miss Earth when it makes its closest approach in April 2029. However, in the grand scheme of things in our vast universe, this will be a close call, and it’ll come so close that billions of people should be able to see it with their naked eyes. Interestingly, the closest flyby to Earth by Apophis will fall on “Friday the 13th” in April of 2029.
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July has been quite hot across much of the nation and, no doubt, there will be plenty of hot weather during the remainder of the month. However, July 2026 will certainly have a difficult time matching the extreme and sustained heat of July 1936. In fact, one of the most widespread and destructive heat waves ever recorded in the US took place in the summer of 1936 which fell right in the middle of arguably the hottest and driest decade ever for the nation.
The decade of the 1930’s is renowned for the “Great Depression” and the “Dust Bowl”, both of which caused calamitous human suffering in this country. Not only were huge numbers of crops destroyed by the heat and lack of moisture in the “Dust Bowl” era, but thousands of lives were lost as a result of the heat, drought and economic hardship. This extreme heat wave was particularly deadly in high population areas where air conditioning was still in the early stages of development. The heat wave experienced in 1936 began in late June, reached a peak in July, and didn’t really come to an end until September. Many of the all-time high temperature records that were set in the 1930’s in numerous cities and states still stand today.
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Nowadays, when the people of New Orleans think of devastating hurricanes they think of Katrina, but before 2005, the most notorious storm name in Louisiana was Audrey. It was sixty-nine years ago from this Saturday when Hurricane Audrey slammed into the southwest coast of Louisiana and became the strongest June hurricane and earliest major (category 3) to make landfall in the US. Hurricane Audrey killed hundreds of people – estimated to be somewhere between 400 and 500 - including many of whom to this day remain unidentified and tragically, about one-third of those were children. The high number of deaths - in an era without satellite imagery - were attributed to the storm moving ashore earlier and stronger than predicted while most people were sleeping.
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Last week featured the first named tropical system of the 2026 season in the Atlantic Basin and while it brought flash flooding to portions of the southern US, it was little in the way of comparison to the first tropical system in June 1972. The official tropical season was barely underway in 1972 when a polar front interacted with an upper-level trough of low pressure over the Yucatan Peninsula. Within a few days, a tropical depression formed and the system moved slowly eastward and emerged in the western Caribbean Sea by the middle of the month. The depression began to intensify over the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea and soon became Tropical Storm Agnes – the first named storm of the 1972 tropical season. Ultimately, Agnes would reach hurricane status, grow to a diameter of about 1000 miles, and become the costliest hurricane at the time to hit the US and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the prime focus of its wrath.
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