“The high changes position on daily, weekly and monthly timescales, which makes it pretty hard to pin down in terms of how it’s going to steer individual storms.”ĭennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and NHC spokesman, agreed, saying that there is no model that reliably forecasts the position of the Bermuda High. “There really isn’t too much we can say about the Bermuda High this far in advance,” said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. Still, predicting where it will be during hurricane season is tricky.
UM professor Ben Kirtman said a slower Gulf Stream is correlating with a westerly movement of the Bermuda high that could mean more rain for the southeast United States. It moves closer to the equator in winter. In the Pacific Ocean, the North Pacific High is strongest during the summer where it sits between Hawaii and California.
During winter, the high retreats toward the Azores. The semi-permanent subtropical anticyclone dominates the Atlantic in the summer when it is closer to Bermuda. “Little wiggles matter.”Įl Niño and La Niña may be key to predicting the energy of a hurricane season, but the Bermuda High is the main player when it comes to steering storms. “We didn’t have those direct impacts like some of the other states did, but it wouldn’t take much of a shift for that to happen,” Graham said about Florida. Of those, five hit Louisiana, setting a record for the most landfalls in a single state in a season. SLOW MOVERS: Hurricane Sally's stall was calamitous for Gulf Coast will slow-moving storms be a trend?īy the time Hurricane Iota ended the season on Nov. MORE: The tropics raged, but 2020 in Florida remembered for heat and rain. RELATED: El Niño isn't coming to the rescue: What that means for 2021's hurricane season A portion of the Three Mile Bridge over Pensacola Bay collapsed after an out-of-control construction barge was pushed into it. 12 over the slick landscape of the Everglades.ĭespite making landfall in Alabama, Sally’s storm surge flooded the Panhandle coasts of Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, tossed boats out of marinas, and covered Johnson Beach Road along the Gulf Islands National Seashore with up to 5 feet of sand. Sally, which ultimately grew to a devastating Category 2 hurricane before making landfall near Gulf Shores, Ala., Sept 16, became a tropical storm about 25 nautical miles west of Homestead on Sept. It then ventured into the Gulf of Mexico, did a loop, and made a second Florida landfall near Cedar Key, northwest of Tampa, on Nov. In an unprecedented hurricane season with 30 named storms, Florida had only one storm make landfall – albeit twice – and one storm form over the Everglades.Įta, which was a major Category 4 hurricane when it rammed into Central America, was a less boisterous 65-mph tropical storm by the time it reached Lower Matecumbe Key on Nov. In 2020, why did Louisiana - and not Florida - take the brunt of hurricanes?
The change would mean hurricanes forming in the tropical runway from Africa to the United States could slide around the high’s underside, recurving harmlessly out to sea or slingshot into the East Coast à la 2004's Frances and Jeanne. Instead of an oval, it would snap back like a rubber band into a dinner plate-shape. A roundabout of winds fueled by cool oceans and warm sunshine was Florida’s unwitting bodyguard during the punishing 2020 hurricane season, ushering rapid fire storms into the Gulf of Mexico with nary a glance at the Sunshine State.īut a shift in upper-air patterns over the United States has one leading meteorologist concerned the Bermuda-Azores high will forsake its 2020 stronghold in the western Atlantic – a move that could leave Florida more vulnerable to a tropical attack from the east.ĭan Kottlowski, a senior hurricane forecaster at the Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather, said last year’s Bermuda High was more oval than circle, a cigar-like shape that bulged into the Gulf of Mexico with clockwise winds steering systems straight through the Caribbean.Ī shimmy to the east of an upper-level trough over the Tennessee Valley would also nudge the Bermuda High in that direction.
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