Colorado Researchers Predict Unusually Calm Hurricane Season

Colorado State University researchers are predicting the quietest Atlantic hurricane season in five years. 

Researchers attribute the predicted quiet hurricane season to rising heat in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, according to Bloomberg.com. 

Nine storms with winds of at least 39 miles per hour are expected to develop this year, and three of them are expected to grow into hurricanes. Only one is expected to become a major storm, said Phil Klotzbach, a lead author of the report. 

"The low forecast is due to El Nino's likely development" in the Pacific and "cool sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic," Klotzbach said in an e-mail interview.

The Atlantic hurricane season is watched by the commodity, energy and insurance industries due to the potentially devastating effects hurricanes have on lives, markets and property in the U.S., the Caribbean and Mexico. 

The last time the Atlantic produced only nine named storms was in 2009, which was also a year in which El Nino was forming, according to Miami's National Hurricane Center. 2009 had the least number of storms since 1997, which had only eight. 

El Nino causes changes in the hurricane forecast because warm waters in the equatorial Pacific trigger atmospheric changes that lead to more wind shear, which is when winds at different altitudes blow in multiple speeds or directions.  

Wind shear can break the structure of a nascent tropical storm system and knock a storm over, weakening it or breaking it down. 

An El Nino watch has been issued by the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology also predicts that the chances of El Nino forming are over 70 percent. 

Last year, the Colorado researchers expected 18 storms, eight of them hurricanes and three major storm systems with winds of at least 111 mph. There ended up being 14, two of which formed into hurricanes, none of them major. 

The 30-year average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major systems. The six-month Atlantic storm season begins on June 1.