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Elijah, where are your write-ups? Some of these articles do not have to do with Hampton Roads...

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Predictions have started rolling in for the upcoming hurricane season and it looks like 2018 will be another busy year - though not quite as brutal as the last one.

On Thursday, the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project team released its annual predictions for the hurricane season that runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

The forecast is for 14 named storms, seven of which they predict will become hurricanes and three that will reach Category 3 or greater with winds of 111 mph or more, according to a Thursday news release.
READ ALSO: Environmentalists call on state to lift environmental regulations suspension post Harvey
The 2017 hurricane season produced a total of 17 named storms, making it the most active since the 2005 season in which Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Josh Lichter, a National Weather Service meteorologist in the Houston/Galveston Weather Forecast Office, said Colorado State's forecast should not incite panic among Texans who still have Hurricane Harvey fresh on their minds.

"I would not, seeing ... a forecast months and months ahead of time, use it as a decision of whether or not I would want to prepare a little heavier or a little more than normal," Lichter said.

This early, he said, the predictions still are changing.
READ ALSO: Fungus that causes deadly bat disease continues its spread in Texas
The Weather Channel reports that the 30-year hurricane season average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and two hurricanes that reach a Category 3 or stronger and Colorado State is predicting "that 2018 hurricane activity will be about 135 percent of the average season."

"By comparison, 2017's hurricane activity was about 245 percent of the average season," the release states.

Ten storms became hurricanes in 2017, including six that were Category 3 or above. It also brought the first two major hurricanes to hit the continental United States in 12 years, Harvey and Irma, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

There have been years in the past where an active season was forecast and nothing happened in Texas, Lichter said. Other years, an inactive season was predicted and one storm caused absolute devastation.

RELATED: 51 Inches-stories of terror, heartbreak, heroism during nation's worst storm

For example, the Colorado team predicted at this time last year that 2017 would bring a below average hurricane season. That prediction proved low given the 17 storms, including Harvey in Texas, Maria in Puerto Rico, and Irma in the southeastern states and the Caribbean.

"The CSU forecast is intended to provide a best estimate of activity to be experienced during the upcoming season - not an exact measure," both the 2017 and 2018 releases said.

But that's why its important to prepare: it only takes one storm, Lichter said.

"Now is a good time to have a plan, to develop a plan for the season for what you and your family and your business would do if we were to get a system that would approach the upper Texas coast and pose a threat to the area," he said.

Residents should visit Hurricane Strong, he continued, to help with the creation of such a plan. The site walks residents through building a disaster response kit, finding the nearest evacuation area, making sure insurance is up to date and hardening homes against heavy wind and rain.

This is the 35th year Colorado researchers have released hurricane predictions. Their data is based on more than 60 years of historical information that includes ocean surface temperatures and level pressures as well as water warming in central and eastern tropical Pacific, commonly referred to as El Nino.

For 2018, Colorado researchers say there is a 38 percent probability that a major hurricane will make landfall along the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville - a number that jumps to 63 percent for the entire Atlantic coastline.

As storms develop this year, like every other year, they will be given names from a list maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. There are 21 names available each year and those lists are recycled every six years. The names of deadly or costly storms are retired. Some examples of retired names are Carla (1961), Beaulah (1967), Alicia (1983), Katrina (2005), and Sandy (2012). A list of retired names can be found here.

If there are more than 21 tropical cyclones in the Atlantic in a year, additional storm names are taken from the Greek Alphabet. This happened in 2005, the same year Hurricane Katrina battered Louisiana. Named storms ran out in October with Wilma. Instead of the hurricane season running from June 1 to Nov. 30, Tropical Storm Zeta (six letters into the Greek alphabet) formed on Dec. 30, 2005, and finally dissipated on Jan. 6 of the next year, according to National Hurricane Center records.

Both the National Weather Service and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center will release their forecasts next month. Colorado researchers will update their predictions on May 31, July 2 and Aug. 2, the release states.
Alex Stuckey covers science and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey.

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The 2018 hurricane season will not be as bad as last year, forecasters predict

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On Thursday, the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project team released its predictions for this year's hurricane season that runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. They predict 14 storms could emanate from the Atlantic ocean this hurricane season -- but they likely won't be as intense as 2017.

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While images of destruction caused by last year's battery of hurricanes are still fresh in the minds of many Americans, including those living on Puerto Rico where after six months power is not fully restored, forecasters are cautioning the public to brace themselves for another busy hurricane season.

Researchers at Colorado State University predict this will be a slightly above-average season, with 14 tropical storms in 2018. Seven are expected to become hurricanes, which have a wind speed of at least 74 mph. Three of those seven are expected to be major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher, with winds reaching a minimum of 111 mph.

The Atlantic Hurricane season runs from June 1 through the end of November.

"Coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them, and they need to prepare the same for every season, regardless of how much activity is predicted," researchers say.

By comparison, 2017 had a total of 17 named storms - with 10 becoming hurricanes and six of them major hurricanes - including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, which ravaged Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. But that number exceeded forecasters' expectations, including the team from CSU. The university had only anticipated 11 tropical storms with four becoming hurricanes.

Before Harvey made landfall it was predicted as merely a tropical storm or Category 1 hurricane with wind speeds up to 85 mph. But within a few days and by the time it hit the ground near Corpus Christi, Texas, it had developed into a Category 4 with 132 mph winds.

"We issue these forecasts to satisfy the curiosity of the general public and to bring attention to the hurricane problem," the university said. "There is a general interest in knowing what the odds are for an active or inactive season."

The report also includes the probability of major hurricanes making landfall:

63 percent for the entire U.S. coastline (average for the last century is 52 percent)

39 percent for the U.S. East Coast, including the Florida Peninsula (average for the last century is 31 percent)

38 percent for the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville (average for the last century is 30 percent)

52 percent for the Caribbean (average for the last century is 42 percent)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will issue its forecast in May.

For readers curious about the names of this year's storms the monikers are selected by the World Meteorological Organization and are usually common names associated with the ethnicity of the basin that would be affected by the storms. When a storm is particularly deadly or costly, its name is retired and replaced by another one.

Here are the names you can expect this year:

Alberto

Beryl

Chris

Debby

Ernesto

Florence

Gordon

Helene

Isaac

Joyce

Kirk

Leslie

Michael

Nadine

Oscar

Patty

Rafael

Sara

Tony

Valerie

William

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2018 Hurricane Season Will Bring Another Battery Of Storms

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While images of destruction caused by last year's battery of hurricanes are still fresh in the minds of many Americans, including those living on Puerto Rico where after six months power is not fully restored, forecasters are cautioning the public to brace themselves for another busy hurricane season.

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NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA- A muggy quiet has settled over New Orleans, Louisiana's Gentilly neighborhood as it soaks up a late-September rainstorm. Deep puddles hide dips in the street. And in a soggy patch of grass, a wooden kiosk tells a story of catastrophe.

"This place is a memorial to the trauma of the Flood," reads the text, written by a local nonprofit, Levees.org. Near here, a section of concrete levee gave way one August morning in 2005, sending the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina crashing into the neighborhood. Yet the monument is not only a reminder of suffering, but also, the text insists, "a symbol of the residents' resilience and determination to return home."

Resilience and rebuilding-those two appealing themes bring hope after a natural disaster. The reality is more complicated. Many who fled Katrina's destruction never did return home. More than 12 years later, tidy brick houses in Gentilly are interspersed with empty lots while post-Katrina lives play out elsewhere.

Some of those survivors, wherever they ultimately ended up, are proving more resilient than others. "One household or family manages to recover," says David Abramson, a public health researcher who studies disasters at New York University in New York City. "The other remains dysfunctional."

Abramson has been surveying people affected by Katrina every few years since the storm. Poor, predominantly black families on cheaper property in lower-lying areas faced disproportionate damage from Katrina-and a harder road to recovery. But with the passage of years, the paths of survivors have diverged in complex, hard-to-predict ways. "Initially, I thought that those with the least would do the worst," Abramson says. "That wasn't always the case."

Special package: Resilience

A series of Science articles examines ways of coping with natural disasters, war and displacement, and climate change-not to mention resilience tactics in nature.

Abramson is one of three social scientists leading a project called Katrina@10. It's looking for long-term predictors of resilience-factors that cushion the shock of disaster and set the course for recovery. In their three long-running studies, the researchers have found a range of factors that seem to help, such as financial resources, social and cultural ties, and access to stable housing after the event, which all seem to help. Now, they're combining their cohorts to see whether those results will generalize. If the predictors they identify hold true across other natural disasters-and that remains to be seen-Katrina@10 could help policymakers and disaster recovery programs pick out especially vulnerable groups. It might even steer them toward interventions that do the most good.

Following survivors wherever they end up, year after year, is an unusual and costly proposition for a field in which disaster experts tend to lurch from one catastrophe to the next. Last year alone saw flooding across Houston, Texas; wildfires in California; and a crushing hurricane in Puerto Rico; to name a few. But studying survivors long after the floodwaters recede can pay off, the researchers say. "The 10- to 15-year time frame allows us to see what's real recovery," Abramson says, "and not just fleeting."

Upended by the storm

Katrina slammed into the Louisiana coast on 29 August 2005, and 80% of New Orleans was soon underwater. The city's Superdome, normally home to raucous football games, overflowed with refugees. Some families trudged out of the city on foot; others who couldn't escape waved for help from rooftops. It's estimated that more than 1800 people died and that the damage exceeded $100 billion. The country had never seen anything like it.

Katrina "is a flash point in people's minds about how bad it could really be," says Jeffrey Hebert, a city planning expert who from 2014 to 2017 served as the city's first "chief resilience officer."

Despite his catchy title, Hebert acknowledges that resilience has many meanings, some easier to measure than others. Engineers may gauge a city's physical resilience by the strain a levee can bear. Pinpointing what makes a person or community resilient is harder. But by a stroke of luck, two social scientists who later became leaders of Katrina@10 were uniquely poised to try. That's because both had been following New Orleanians before the storm for unrelated studies, and so were able to pivot and compare subjects' lives before with what came after.

One was Mark VanLandingham, a sociologist at Tulane University here. In 2002, he launched a project in the quiet area of eastern New Orleans comparing the lives of Vietnamese immigrants who had settled here after evacuating from Saigon in 1975 with those of families who stayed behind in Vietnam. In the summer of 2005, his team was wrapping up a survey on the health and well-being of people in 125 Vietnamese households.

Meanwhile, another sociologist, Mary Waters from Harvard University, was part of a nationwide study examining how higher education affects the health of single parents. The team had reached about 500 first-generation college students in the New Orleans area for a phone survey when Katrina sent them fleeing for dry ground.

Waters, safe and dry in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and VanLandingham, who escaped to Galveston, Texas, before his own house took on a meter of water, didn't know each other. They didn't know much about disaster research. But both immediately recognized that their questionnaires documenting the health, social networks, and personality traits of Vietnamese immigrants and mostly poor, black, single mothers before the hurricane had taken on outsize significance.

In the months after Katrina, Waters and VanLandingham, along with their colleagues, began tracking down their displaced participants to see how they were faring. The researchers tried calling the phone numbers on file and sent teams to search New Orleans neighborhoods for participants or friends who might know where to find them.

Meanwhile, Katrina's devastation also drew Abramson in. He had been exploring the impact of HIV/AIDS in New York City, but the storm inspired him to lead a caravan of about 30 researchers, graduate students, and health workers to visit temporary housing sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Mississippi and Louisiana. Their goal was to monitor those families over the coming years as they sought permanent housing back in their original neighborhoods or elsewhere, and to track how disaster and displacement affected health.

In a first round of surveys, Abramson's Gulf Coast Child and Family Health Study interviewed people from 1079 displaced households between 6 and 12 months after the storm. As the team's 12-passenger vans rolled through FEMA housing sites, they found families of six crammed into trailers, uncertain whether they'd be forced to move out on a few days' notice. Some feared for their safety and kept their children inside. "It made for a very claustrophobic and depressing situation," Abramson says.

Abramson would track those families over time and watch their paths diverge. But in another population, a future colleague of VanLandingham's saw a different trajectory from the start. Cam Tran had immigrated from Vietnam as a child, and after Katrina she traveled from her home in Texas to New Orleans to help her in-laws recover. Tran remembers the day she drove into their neighborhood, about a month after the storm.

"It was completely gloomy and dark," she says. "No sound." But as Tran approached Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, she heard music from a car radio and saw neighbors rebuilding the church roof. "We asked them, 'Is it safe for people to come back?' and they said, 'Well, you know, there's no electricity or water or anything like that. But yes, please do come back!'"

Tran took their advice. She moved here and helped set up a charter school. And she later became a coordinator for VanLandingham's study, Katrina Impacts on Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans, which showed that the optimistic welcome she received from the rebuilders presaged an entire community's long-term recovery. In the coming months, VanLandingham watched members of the community wake at daybreak, drive back to their neighborhood, and rebuild-one house at a time. They seemed to embody resilience.

Two years later, when VanLandingham and Abramson met for the first time at a conference here, they discovered that some of their participants hailed from adjacent neighborhoods. Together, as the pair drove those streets in VanLandingham's Subaru Outback, something started to click: Families in the two studies had similar economic means and their homes had sustained similar levels of damage. Conventional wisdom might have predicted similar recoveries. But it was "as if they had almost suffered two entirely different events," Abramson says.

The neighborhood of Abramson's mostly black participants, the ones who'd wound up in FEMA housing and whom Abramson was now carefully tracking, was still strewn with debris and abandoned belongings. In a preliminary analysis, that group was scoring well below VanLandingham's Vietnamese families in mental health surveys. Why did such gaps exist between those communities when it came to resilience, the researchers wondered, and could anything be done to narrow them?

Survivor paths diverge

Years passed, but the sociologists didn't leave. For Waters, there never seemed to be a good time to stop. "We didn't set it up to be a study that was going to last 10 or 15 years," she says. But in each round of interviews, "it was so clear that we were in the middle of the story."

By 2009, the women in Waters's Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project were scattered across 23 states, and just 16% had returned to their prehurricane homes. The RISK researchers examined mental health trajectories, in particular whether those women had returned to their level of psychological functioning from before the storm. Some had, among them "Keanna," who built a new life in Houston with her husband and five children. She re-enrolled in school and started her own business; she said she had developed a deeper relationship with God. On the other end of the spectrum sat "Belinda," also a mother of five, who spent nearly a year at a friend's house in Arkansas before returning to New Orleans. She became estranged from her partner, struggled to support two unemployed sisters, and faced depression and weight gain.

Some of the factors widening that divide were predictable. In the RISK Project, researchers found that stressors such as going without food or water after the storm or, worse, losing a loved one predicted longer-term mental health struggles, as did reporting a weak social support network before Katrina. But other findings took Waters by surprise-such as the fact that, controlling for all other factors, the loss of a pet because of the storm had lasting negative effects.

The faster you move somebody into stable housing, the faster, more accelerated, and more durable their recovery will be.

David Abramson, New York University

Abramson, meanwhile, developed an analytical tool to gauge recovery on the basis of measurements in five areas: physical and mental health, economic stability, stable housing, and "social role adaptation," or how people feel that they fit into their community. That framework allowed him to identify prestorm factors that most contributed to long-term recovery. For example, measures of "psychological strength"-which included religiosity and the perceived ability to adapt to stressors-were most predictive of a strong recovery. Having a household income of at least $20,000 was close behind. Being older than 50 or disabled had strongly negative effects on recovery, as did spending a prolonged period displaced from one's home. How returning home versus resettling elsewhere influenced recovery remains an open question.

VanLandingham's study took yet another tack: It became a deep dive into the role of culture and history in resilience. Interviews with some of his original study participants and community leaders suggested that the shared experience of the Vietnam War and immigration had united neighbors, motivating them to rebuild. In a book published last year, Weathering Katrina: Culture and Recovery among Vietnamese-Americans, VanLandingham also suggested that this community's members bounced back faster than many black residents of similar means because they faced less discrimination.

The long view

Long-term resilience studies such as these are unusual, in part because funding for them is hard to sustain. And in 2012, VanLandingham's prospects for continuing his project looked bleak. His application for new funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) was rejected. Reviewers were mostly positive, but they complained that he had no comparison group, no way to put his findings into context. Then, an NIH program officer told him that he wasn't alone.

"She said, 'There's this woman at Harvard having the same problem,'" VanLandingham recalls. He contacted Waters, and they recruited Abramson. In 2015, the trio won about $6 million in NIH funding over 5 years for what was finally, a decade after the storm, a unified effort: Katrina@10.

The study has an ambitious goal: to build a crystal ball that uses a few characteristics to predict disaster recovery in the long term. The effort includes a new round of standardized surveys in the three original cohorts, plus two other data sets to put them in a broader context. One data set is from the U.S. Census Bureau and covers New Orleans's changing demographics. The other is drawn from a random sampling of people who had lived there before Katrina and includes information on health and well-being. The study's findings could help other communities traumatized by fires, floods, and earthquakes, by identifying people at highest risk and how best to help them.

Abramson already has a hunch about one factor that will rise to the top, on the basis of unpublished data from his cohort, which started off in those FEMA trailers. "The faster you move somebody into stable housing, the faster, more accelerated, and more durable their recovery will be," he predicts. If he can confirm that suspicion in the larger Katrina@10 cohort, it could help improve how emergency response agencies operate. For example, recovery programs could invest in more durable housing for evacuees rather than provisional camps, he says.

But the researchers also come back to what they've seen firsthand: Different communities have different needs, and different strengths and weaknesses. Abramson envisions a future in which organizations that step in to help after a disaster can gauge how resilient the person sitting in front of them is likely to be.

For now, Katrina@10 has a more prosaic task at hand: rounding up its megacohort of the roughly 2200 participants from the three original studies for one last interview. A team of graduate students has helped track participants online when the numbers and contacts on file led nowhere. One student found a participant by tracing the auto body shop uniform he was wearing in a Facebook photo.

In the most recent round of interviews, some participants seemed befuddled that the researchers were still at it. But Tran noticed a change in their attitudes after Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, a city that welcomed many New Orleans refugees in 2005. Harvey's landfall last summer, almost exactly 12 years after Katrina's, brought back memories-and nurtured a grim camaraderie. "It was like, 'Oh my gosh, now we've got to find some way to help the Houston community because of what they did for us,'" Tran says.

Abramson is plotting studies of resilience in Hurricane Harvey survivors-along with people coping with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico weeks later-to compare their trajectories to what he's seen in Katrina survivors. If common drivers of resilience emerge across varied disasters, Katrina@10 participants may end up helping fellow survivors in more ways than they ever imagined.

doi:10.1126/science.aat4459

Kelly is a staff writer at Science.

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More than 12 years after Hurricane Katrina, scientists are learning what makes some survivors more resilient than others

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NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA- A muggy quiet has settled over New Orleans, Louisiana's Gentilly neighborhood as it soaks up a late-September rainstorm. Deep puddles hide dips in the street. And in a soggy patch of grass, a wooden kiosk tells a story of catastrophe.

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When Hurricane Irma tore through Florida in early September, 40 scientists took shelter in the Archbold Biological Station, a fortified research facility in the south-central part of the state. They huddled there with friends, family and pets while floods and pounding winds destroyed homes across the state. It will take months for those researchers and others to assess the extent of the destruction left behind by both Irma and Hurricane Harvey, which blasted through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

But even as they try to get their own lives in order, scientists across the region have already started gathering data that they hope will improve understanding of how these extreme storms behave, how to improve public safety and how delicate ecosystems react.

It is fairly rare to see such intense hurricanes hitting the US mainland, says Joshua Wurman, a meteorologist at the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado. When they made landfall, Harvey and Irma were category 4 storms-the second most extreme rating on a scale of 1 to 5-and their swirling winds were of particular interest to Wurman and his team. So the researchers drove an instrument called a Doppler-on-wheels (DOW) to Texas and Florida to collect data from the eyes of both hurricanes.

The DOW is a mobile Doppler radar dish bolted onto the back of a flatbed truck that scientists position in the path of hurricanes and tornados. It takes high-resolution measurements of wind speed and direction, as well as the speed and quantity of precipitation, in real time.

Wurman and his colleagues measured a surprising mosaic of wind speeds in Harvey and Irma. Some pockets within the hurricanes had wind speeds of up to 225 kilometres per hour (140 miles per hour), nearly 30% higher than those of nearby pockets. "In Harvey, 140-mile-per-hour gusts were ripping apart buildings and throwing cars," says Wurman. Understanding where the most extreme winds will materialize in a hurricane can help to improve the accuracy of public warnings, he says.

Shelter in place

The DOW crew was able to leave Texas and Florida soon after gathering the data. But the scientists who took shelter in the Archbold Biological Station-which is nestled in the headwaters of the Everglades wetland region in Venus, Florida-live and work in the state.

Evelyn Gaiser, an aquatic ecologist at Florida International University in Miami, was one of the researchers who weathered Irma at the station. After the storm, she says, "we were all outside collecting data".

Roughly 50 researchers work from the station throughout the year, says biologist Hilary Swain, Archbold's executive director. Their projects range from monitoring the area's lakes and ecosystems to carrying on a long-term observational study of a population of Florida scrub jays ( Aphelocoma coerulescens) listed as threatened by the federal government. Initial checks on the birds found that they had weathered Irma just fine.

Gaiser studies nearby Lake Annie, and found that Irma had upended its temperature profile. Normally, layers of warm water rest on top of cooler layers-but the hurricane brought colder waters to the surface. In the next few months, Gaiser will be monitoring whether or not that inversion has affected the lake's plant communities.

Another priority for Gaiser is checking on a long-term ecological research project that she oversees in Everglades National Park in south Florida. Officials closed the park on September 6 in preparation for Irma and started reopening certain areas on September 21. Gaiser is not sure when her team will be able to access the project's sites.

Increased amounts of salt water, carried in by storm surges, can disrupt the delicate balance of fresh- and saltwater systems that shape the region. "Fresh water is the lifeblood of the Everglades," Gaiser says. She is anxious to see how the mix of water from the storm surge, rain and run-off has affected the health of the wetlands, and is planning to submit a proposal for a rapid-response research grant from the US National Science Foundation to help collect those data.

Salting a marsh

Merryl Alber, a marine ecologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, will be taking similar measurements at sites for her own long-term ecological research project on Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the Georgia coast that was also affected by Irma. In an ongoing experiment in the island's freshwater marshes, her team adds diluted salt water to 6.25-square-metre plots to simulate salinity increases from rising sea levels, storm surges or droughts.

After Irma, Alber returned to Sapelo briefly to check her experimental sites. She found that a 1.5-metre-high storm surge had raised salinity to 5 times the base levels in the artificially salted sites.

Irma's storm surge was a naturally occurring amplification of the experiment that Alber and her team have been doing for years, and Alber plans to compare its effects with their past findings. But that will take time. The labs and some of the researchers' homes on the island flooded during the storm.

The team will follow through on its annual data collection at the long-term research sites, says Alber. But with so much destruction in the region, her work isn't the only thing on her mind. "It's a little less the science we're worried about. It's the people."
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 27, 2017.

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Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Send Scientists Searching for Data

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When Hurricane Irma tore through Florida in early September, 40 scientists took shelter in the Archbold Biological Station, a fortified research facility in the south-central part of the state. They huddled there with friends, family and pets while floods and pounding winds destroyed homes across the state.

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The 2017 hurricane season has been a full-on assault from Mother Nature. We are under siege, and our attackers have benign names like Harvey and Irma and Maria. But they are callous, powerful, indiscriminate, terrifying, destructive, merciless and relentless.

Is Earth trying to eject us from the planet? Again and again and again the harshest of winds and hardest of rains has pounded on the most-defenseless territories we have. The Caribbean islands, hanging out in open sea. The Florida peninsula, jutting out into danger. The Texas coastline, low-lying and concrete-laden. Nearly a full month of back-to-back-to-back disasters.

This hurricane season - not yet even close to finished - has generated more destructive, land-falling storms than the past few years combined. Four of this year's monsters went on to become Category 4 or 5, and three of those made landfall in U.S. territory. The U.S. has never been hit by three storms this strong in the same season in modern records.

[Hurricane Maria expected to pass close to the Carolinas next week]

Hurricane Harvey seemed to spin up in an instant before hitting land on Aug. 26, only to come to rest for days over Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana. A mind-boggling 19 trillion gallons of rain fell in that storm, which triggered unprecedented flooding. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott estimates Harvey will cost the state up to $180 billion - more than epic Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Irma was one of the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. When Irma maintained 180 mph wind speeds for 37 hours, it set a record for most intense storm for such a long duration - anywhere on Earth. It made landfall Sept. 10, strafing the Florida Keys before terrorizing both Florida coasts in vastly different ways. It knocked out power to millions of people, and some are still waiting for the lights to come back on.

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico 10 days later as the strongest storm to hit the island since the 1928 San Felipe hurricane. It thrashed the U.S. territory with winds over 100 mph and more than 30 inches of rain. All of Puerto Rico lost power and was under flash flood warnings. The full extent of the damage, and the loss of life, might not be known for some time. It could take months to restore infrastructure.

All of this in just four weeks.

It spurs so many questions: Is this barrage random? Is it part of a natural cycle? Is it the result of climate change? Have we done this to ourselves?

[Graphic: How much rain Maria dropped on Puerto Rico]

Officials at the highest levels - who create, pass and sign the very policies that affect the environment - are bending over backward to dodge those questions. The political tension is palpable.

"To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm; versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced," Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told CNN as Hurricane Irma approached Florida.

When the question was posed to President Trump on his way to visit hurricane-battered Florida, he replied: "We've had storms over the years that have been bigger than this."

To our struggling politicians, Pope Francis offered some advice: Climate change is happening, and you have a "moral responsibility" to do something about it.

"Those who deny this must go to the scientists and ask them," he said on a recent trip to Colombia. "They speak very clearly."

If they continue to deny climate change, he added, "history will judge those decisions."

This hurricane season is, indisputably, a nightmare. And it's indisputable that climate change is affecting our weather. The fingerprint of climate change is on every storm, it's in every raindrop and sunny day. It is a new, yet untested and ill-understood, factor in the way our planet works.

But there are additional elements that had to come together to create such a hellish year.

Hurricanes exist to cool the tropics. The vast majority of sunlight beats down in the 23 degrees north and south of the equator. Without something to disperse the energy toward the poles, Earth's climate would become unbalanced, quickly.

These planetary heat engines sprout from relatively weak clusters of thunderstorms - waves of low pressure from the coast of Africa - and fester in the warm waters of the Atlantic. They feed on tropical moisture and the sun's intense energy and, eventually, if they get large enough, will start to spin thanks to Earth's top-like motion.

Hurricanes can form in rapid succession and travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic, like rail cars on a train track or airplanes lining up for takeoff. Because they can gain steam, spinning themselves up into monstrosities, it's a trip that can end in the devastation of places like St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Southwest Louisiana. One after the other.

We saw this alignment in 2005, and we're seeing it again in 2017.

"This isn't a random coming together," said Gerry Bell, a hurricane climate specialist at NOAA. It's a specific combination of environmental factors.

The Atlantic Ocean is in a pattern that's particularly favorable for hurricanes. Every couple of decades, the pattern flips, but it's been positive since about 1995.

[Fear is in the water, spreading with new and viral efficiency]

There have been some exceptionally big seasons in the past two decades. The extreme years tend to happen when the things that weaken hurricanes are not present - like El Niño and chaotic, hurricane-killing winds over the Atlantic Ocean. When those forces stand down, the favorable pattern goes to work.

Factor in some exceptionally warm ocean water, and it becomes nearly impossible to avoid a strong season.

"We are seeing some of the hottest ocean temperatures in the planet in the western Caribbean Sea," said Michael Ventrice, a research meteorologist at the Weather Company. "This is like rocket fuel for developing tropical cyclones. A major concern for late-season development."

But hurricanes need to make landfall to generate the kind of disasters seen so far this year. Steering winds determine their path, though they aren't always as predictable as forecasters would like. Which Florida coast would receive Hurricane Irma's landfall - Miami or the Gulf - was a result of uncertainty in the wind forecast. It hit near Naples, Fla., and went north, but the massive storm covered the entire state, knocking out power to millions and causing flooding and damage from the Florida Keys to Jacksonville and beyond.

The Florida Peninsula is only about 100 miles wide - a tiny distance on a global scale. Hurricane Irma was going to turn north somewhere near South Florida, forecasters knew that. But a few miles of deviation meant some people were spared while others were inundated with storm surge and damaging winds.

In the same way, Puerto Rico avoided Irma's destructive inner core, only to be devastated by Hurricane Maria. These winds are fickle, but deadly.

If we zoom out to the big picture, though, the steering winds over the Atlantic Ocean have been very predictable this season. Unfortunately for all the humans who live there, the winds have been guiding hurricanes straight into the Caribbean islands and the Southern United States.

It's a significant shift. For the past decade, those winds were coming from the west, pushing hurricanes away from land and out to sea, rendering them largely harmless.

"We were very fortunate, since 2005," Bell said. "But it was just a matter of time before they were going to start making landfall again."

This year is remarkably similar to 2005, when storm after storm exploded over the Caribbean and then made landfall. Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma are among the more memorable of that year.

The 2017 season is only half over. There will be more storms, and the wind isn't going to change any time soon. At least one forecast company thinks this heightened level of activity will continue.

"I would be surprised if October wasn't more active than normal, with one or more potential threats to the eastern Gulf Coast originating in the central or western Caribbean," Ryan Truchelut, the president of WeatherTiger, predicted.

More potential threats, more hurricanes. More lives lost and more destruction.

"A lot of people have already been through a lifetime of impacts, but there are going to be more storms, we know that," Bell warned. "They have to stay prepared."
Jason Samenow contributed to this report.

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Harvey. Irma. Maria. Why is this hurricane season so bad?

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The 2017 hurricane season has been a full-on assault from Mother Nature. We are under siege, and our attackers have benign names like Harvey and Irma and Maria. But they are callous, powerful, indiscriminate, terrifying, destructive, merciless and relentless. Is Earth trying to eject us from the planet?

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Hurricanes: The Greatest Storms on Earth : Feature Articles

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Few things in nature can compare to the destructive force of a hurricane. Called the greatest storm on Earth, a hurricane is capable of annihilating coastal areas with sustained winds of 155 mph or higher and intense areas of rainfall and a storm surge.

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Republished from the pages of National Geographic magazine

When the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic is bearing down on you, a salvaged armchair under a wood-and-tin awning might seem a poor choice of shelter. But that's where Don E. ("I'd rather keep my last name out of it") was parked when Wilma hit South Florida at 6:30 a.m. last October 24. For Don and a buddy, it was the start of the workday at Jimbo's Place, a ramshackle beer and bait shop down by the water on Miami's Virginia Key. "Once we got out here, it was kind of too late to do anything but ride it out," Don says with a small laugh.

Jimbo's looks like nothing so much as an abandoned shack. But whether through good luck or unexpectedly sound construction, it survived Wilma's fury. Mercifully, the winds had ebbed from 185 miles per hour (297.7 kilometers per hour) at sea to 120 miles per hour (193.1 kilometers per hour) by the time the storm hit, but Wilma still left almost all of South Florida without power. For the next two weeks a generator and donated bags of ice kept Jimbo's open-the only establishment on the key where visitors could be assured of a cold beer and a friendly welcome.

Wilma was a record breaker in a season of unsettling records. Katrina, at the end of August, killed more than a thousand people and left much of New Orleans and the neighboring coast in ruins. The damage exceeded a hundred billion dollars-the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history-and the toll in fractured lives is incalculable. Rita, in September, rivaled Wilma in intensity and ravaged the Gulf Coast through western Louisiana and East Texas.

These three monster storms were part of an unmatched run of Atlantic hurricanes-15 in all. With a total of 27 named tropical storms, 2005 was the first year meteorologists exhausted their preseason list of 21 Atlantic cyclone names and had to dip into the Greek alphabet for the latecomers.

Days after Wilma, one visitor to Jimbo's was already worrying about what future hurricane seasons might bring. Sharan Majumdar, 34, is a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, just across the highway from Jimbo's. He is one of a cadre of scientists trying to understand nature's most powerful storms and more reliably predict their surges, ebbs, and lurching paths from birth to landfall.

Swatting at sand flies on a warm November night, Majumdar says he can't really blame his fellow patrons at Jimbo's for deciding to stay put during Wilma. Forecasts today can get hurricane tracks wrong by hundreds of miles and wind speeds by tens of miles per hour (16.1 kilometers per hour). As a result, Majumdar says, "people often return after an evacuation to find nothing really happened." The solution, he says, is to improve forecasting through better science. "That's the only way to get people to trust the warnings."

The stakes have never been higher. Population is burgeoning along vulnerable coasts in the U.S., Asia, and the Caribbean. In the southeastern U.S., for example, coastal populations grew more than 50 percent from 1980 to 2003. The North Atlantic hurricane nursery, responding to a natural climate cycle, is experiencing a baby boom that isn't expected to end for a decade or more. And behind it all lurks the grim possibility that global warming is making these storms stronger.

Like all weather, hurricanes are fueled by heat-the heat of sun-drenched tropical seas, which powers the storms by sending warm, moist air rushing toward the frigid upper atmosphere like smoke up a chimney. As surrounding air is sucked in at the base of the storm, Earth's rotation gives it a twist, creating a whorl of rain bands. These whiptails of thunderstorm activity are strongest where they converge in a ring of rising, spinning air, the eyewall, which encloses the cloud-free eye.

Hurricanes (called typhoons in the western Pacific and tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean) can propel themselves to an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) or more, where the rising air finally vents itself in spiraling exhaust jets of cirrus clouds. The largest ever, the 1979 Pacific typhoon Tip, sent gale-force winds across more than 650 miles (965.6 kilometers). Even an average hurricane packs some 1.5 trillion watts of power in its winds-equivalent to about half the world's entire electrical generating capacity.

Starting this great weather engine requires surface waters of 80 degrees or more, moist air, and little wind shear-a difference in wind speed at the surface and aloft that can tear apart a developing hurricane. But those ingredients often produce nothing more than a tropical disturbance-an unremarkable cluster of thunderstorms. "Disturbances look very similar day to day," says David Nolan of the Rosenstiel School, "and then all of a sudden you get a big burst of convection, then within six hours it becomes a depression, then it becomes a hurricane, then it's flooding my apartment." Katrina soaked Nolan's 14th-floor Miami Beach home as the storm crossed Florida on its fateful course to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. "It would be really nice to say what you need to make a hurricane," he adds. "And we really can't do that yet."

One thing was clear in 2005: Conditions were ideal for making hurricanes. From June through November-the official Atlantic hurricane season-bulletins and warnings streamed from the National Hurricane Center in Miami. But the most telling moment of the season came on November 29, one day before its official end, when NHC director Max Mayfield and other officials gave a summary report. Even as the officials recited a sobering roll call of power and destruction, the NHC duty forecaster was charting tropical storm Epsilon, just then getting ready to spin itself into yet another hurricane.

Yet 2005 was just a continuation of the upward trend that began in 1995. Because of a tropical climate shift that brought warmer waters and reduced wind shear, the Atlantic has spawned unusual numbers of hurricanes for nine of the past eleven seasons. "We're 11 years into the cycle of high activity and landfall," NOAA meteorologist Gerry Bell says, "but I can't tell you if it will last another ten years, or thirty."

Weather satellites make it easy for meteorologists to keep tabs on hurricanes. But ordinary satellite images show only the cloud tops. Spaceborne infrared sensors can reveal more detail, charting the size and shape of the warm eye, and satellite radar and microwave sensors can map the rain. Hurricane hunter aircraft actually fly right into Atlantic hurricanes. But they only probe conditions at altitudes of several thousand feet, above the worst turbulence, Jack Beven of the NHC says-"not at the surface, where they really matter to people."

Last year, though, scientists flew a robotic aircraft straight into the maelstrom when tropical storm Ophelia was parked off the mid-Atlantic coast. The craft, called Aerosonde, swooped and circled for ten hours, as low as 1,200 feet (365.8 meters), monitoring winds and the flow of heat and moisture from the ocean into the storm.

That foray was a test, but forecasters routinely probe the heart of storms with shorter lived devices called dropsondes. Released from highflying aircraft into hurricanes and the surrounding winds, these instrument-packed tubes descend by parachute. "They take about 15 minutes from 40,000 feet (12,192 meters) to splash," Majumdar says. Along the way, they measure temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind every half second, transmitting it all to the airplane before they hit the water.

By cranking dropsonde data into computer models that can simulate a storm and how it is likely to evolve, researchers have sharpened their forecasts of storm tracks. Three-day forecasts of Atlantic storm positions were off by an average of 440 miles (708.1 kilometers) in the 1970s; by 2005 the average error had dropped to 173 miles (278.4 kilometers). But one-day forecasts were still wide of the mark by an average of 70 miles (112.7 kilometers)-more than enough to keep coastal dwellers second-guessing the experts. The data and models still can't capture storms in enough detail to forecast all of their feints and swerves.

Storm intensity is proving even harder to forecast. Three-day wind-speed forecasts, off by an average of 23 miles per hour (37 kilometers per hour) in the early 1990s, had improved only marginally by 2005. Hurricanes regularly surprise observers with their mood shifts. In a matter of hours, a Category 5 storm (winds over 155 miles per hour [249.4 kilometers per hour]) can fade to a Category 3 (111-130 miles per hour [178.6-209.2 kilometers per hour]), or a mere tropical storm can explode into a killer. "Intensity changes are the things that really hurt people," says NOAA's Bell.

The state of the ocean below a storm explains some intensity shifts. In 1995, tropical storm Opal was inching toward Category 1 status-an entry-level hurricane-as it made its way through the western Gulf of Mexico. Then, in just 14 hours, it surged to Category 4. Satellite readings of the warm sea surface showed nothing unusual. But Nick Shay of the Rosenstiel School and his colleagues discovered that the warm layer wasn't limited to the top few yards of the ocean, as it usually is in the Gulf. Cold water at greater depths acts as a brake on hurricane intensity when the winds churn it to the surface. But Opal had strayed across a pool of warm water extending hundreds of feet down. No matter how hard the wind blew, it stirred up more hurricane fuel, causing the storm to intensify.

The tropical ocean is littered with these deep warm pockets, and their importance was underscored last year by both Katrina and Rita, which shot up to Category 5 when they passed over a deep band of warm Gulf water called the Loop Current. Satellites can detect subsurface warmth by looking for subtle bulges in the sea surface, Shay says. "It's not really rocket science, but here's something that works and improves intensity forecasts by 5 to 15 percent."

Waves, on the other hand, can blunt a storm. Whipped up by a hurricane, they can reach heights of more than a hundred feet (30.5 meters), exerting a drag on the winds that created them. "Heat adds fuel, but waves slow the winds down-they're fighting each other," says Shuyi Chen of the Rosenstiel School, who is collaborating on a powerful new computer model, called the Hurricane Weather and Research Forecasting model, that will simulate the fine details of the interplay between atmosphere, waves, and ocean. "You can get a forecast one to two categories wrong if you don't get the waves right."

Forecasters also need to understand a hurricane's internal workings. Katrina, for example, had grown into a certifiable monster by the morning of Sunday, August 28. Sucking energy from the Loop Current, the storm had screamed from the low end of Category 3 to a peak of 175 miles per hour (281.6 kilometers per hour), well into Category 5, in just 12 hours. As Katrina barreled toward land, the NHC issued an apocalyptic warning: "POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC HURRICANE KATRINA MENACING THE NORTHERN GULF COAST."

And then, swiftly and remarkably, the storm took a breather. In satellite images late Sunday, hours before landfall, a huge bite appeared in the southern side of the eyewall. Scientists probing the storm with aircraft and radar in a project called RAINEX worked out what had happened. Katrina's ferocious rain bands had converged toward the heart of the storm, cutting off the eyewall's moisture supply. The old eyewall broke up and a new one formed farther out-an inertial brake that slowed the storm just as a skater's arms slow her spin when she thrusts them outward.

If Katrina had been moving just a little faster, it could have hit land as a Category 5 horror. Instead, thanks to the timing of its eyewall replacement, it sideswiped New Orleans as a milder-but still devastating-Category 3.

For a hurricane, landfall is a death sentence. Once its watery fuel supply has been cut off, the storm inevitably weakens. But that is scant solace to those caught up in its death throes.

From a washed-out stretch of Highway 90 along the Mississippi coast, almost four months after Katrina, the view inland took your breath away. The once lush coastline was still a litter of debris and splintered wood, houses swept from their concrete slabs, ancient spreading oaks stripped of Spanish moss and festooned with rags and tattered plastic.

Water was the primary agent of destruction here. Most hurricane casualties come not from wind but from rain, waves, and, as the scene here made harshly evident, surge-the vast mound of seawater that is pushed in front of the storm, rising 28 feet (8.5 meters) or more in the case of Katrina.

"If you really want to wallop something," says Rick Luettich, a coastal oceanographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Mississippi and Alabama are pretty close to ideal for maximum storm surge." The coastal waters are shallow, easily plowed up by inrushing winds. Local features matter too, says Luettich, who has worked on a computer program that forecasts surge height. Bays and estuaries can funnel and intensify surge, for example, while barrier islands and wetlands can buffer it.

Coastal development weakens those defenses, as a flight over an adjacent stretch of coast in Louisiana makes clear. Channels crisscross the marshlands, dredged for boat traffic. They let salt water into the back marshes, killing vegetation that holds them together. Add all the dikes and levees that hem in the Mississippi, cutting off the sediment that once replenished the marshes, and the result is staggering: More than 20 percent of Louisiana's coastal wetlands reverted to open water from the 1950s through 2000, 27 square miles (70 square kilometers) every year. The pilot holds up his chart of the tattered coast. "This here is the newest edition," he says. "But it's already out of date."

The full impact of a giant hurricane can't be measured in categories and wind speeds, in damage to homes and ecosystems, or even in lives lost. Those who live through one are never quite the same afterward. Tammy VanderZyl was a manager at Remoulade restaurant in New Orleans. She weathered Katrina in her apartment, then lived on the edge for three weeks with a group of near strangers. "You see things you never thought you would see," she recalls. "I saw whitecaps in my parking lot."

In his recent book, Divine Wind, Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, intersperses the science and lore of hurricanes with paintings, poems, and literary excerpts inspired by the great storms of history. None is more poignant than the haiku VanderZyl composed after confronting Katrina:

For VanderZyl and many of her fellow New Orleanians, the answer to the final line is obvious: right back home. The city will be different now. But leave? "No way," she says. "Things would have to get way worse than this."

Just over the horizon of scientific certainty lies the disturbing possibility that they might. Kerry Emanuel is by all accounts a cautious scientist. For years he believed there was no good evidence that global warming was making hurricanes any stronger. But last year new calculations stopped him in his tracks. When he looked at the total power of tropical cyclones worldwide, he was faced with the conclusion that during the past three decades, the storms have grown almost twice as destructive.

Emanuel's results, published weeks before Katrina, were soon joined by another study, led by Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Webster concluded that the strongest storms-Categories 4 and 5-have become nearly twice as common over 35 years. The likely culprit, both scientists say, is global warming, which is adding hurricane-nurturing heat to the oceans.

It would be easier to find a building undamaged by Katrina in New Orleans' Ninth Ward than to locate a reputable climate scientist who doubts that human activity is warming the Earth. But the claim that hurricanes are growing stronger as a result has set off a tempest of its own. William Gray of Colorado State University, a pioneer hurricane forecaster, has called it "plain wrong." He and the NHC's Christopher Landsea say Emanuel and Webster's statistics are fuzzy and that data on past storms can't be trusted. Until weather satellites became common in the 1970s, many tropical storms at sea went unrecorded, and since then changes in sensing technology have made it difficult to compare hurricane strengths.

Emanuel agrees that the data aren't perfect. "But this is an important issue," he says, "and the only way to get a better answer would be to have a longer record of reliable data," which would make any trends stand out.

To improve the record, Landsea has been analyzing hurricanes back to the mid-1800s, trying to gauge their intensity from accounts of storm surge and wind damage. Other researchers are looking for signs of past hurricanes at the bottom of coastal lakes, where the strongest storms deposited layers of windblown beach sand, and in the wood of old trees from coastal forests. Rainwater from hurricanes is minutely lighter than regular rain, so a tree drenched by passing hurricanes preserves a subtle record of each storm in its growth rings.

While the debates go on, hurricanes will continue to strike increasingly populous coasts. That, says Landsea, is reason enough to worry. "The changes in society are as important, if not more important than global warming, or even natural cycles," he says. "When you double some vulnerable populations every 20 to 30 years, that's what's going to cause disasters. We've got a huge problem even if hurricanes don't change at all."

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Atlantic Hurricane Article, Storm Information, Hurricane Research Facts -- National Geographic

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Republished from the pages of National Geographic magazine When the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic is bearing down on you, a salvaged armchair under a wood-and-tin awning might seem a poor choice of shelter. But that's where Don E.

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As Tropical Storm Harvey focused national attention on Texas and the Gulf Coast, another tropical storm was forming Monday off the South Carolina coast - though it's expected to have minimal impact on Maryland's coast.

Tropical Storm Irma was still a disorganized area of rain and winds early Monday, but the National Hurricane Center predicted a 90 percent chance that it would develop into a tropical cyclone within 48 hours.

A tropical storm watch was placed into effect from Charleston, S.C., to the North Carolina-Virginia border. The hurricane center was predicting 3 to 6 inches of rain and perhaps up to 9 inches in parts of the Carolinas and Virginia.

Irma is forecast to brush the Delmarva peninsula Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, but the storm is not expected to bring more than rain, heavy surf and blustery winds to the Maryland shoreline.

Meteorologists expect up to an inch of rain could fall in Ocean City and across the lower Eastern Shore, though they estimated there's only about a 15 percent chance that winds could reach tropical storm force in that region.

The end of August and beginning of September mark the heart of hurricane season in the Atlantic, and it has been an active season this year.

Harvey was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States in a dozen years. Conditions in the Gulf of Mexico and across southern Texas and Louisiana aren't letting the storm dissipate, or escape the region, contributing to the record-setting deadly flooding there.

On average, the season's first major hurricane doesn't form until early September. By this time of the season, four or five tropical storms have typically formed, but Irma would be the ninth.

The 2017 season might well add a 10th by the weekend. The hurricane center says a trough of low pressure, known as a wave, off the coast of Africa has a 70 percent chance of becoming Tropical Storm Jose in the next five days.
Tribune News Service contributed to this article. sdance@baltsun.com twitter.com/ssdance

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Tropical Storm Irma expected to bring rain to Maryland, Delaware beaches

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As Tropical Storm Harvey focused national attention on Texas and the Gulf Coast, another tropical storm was forming Monday off the South Carolina coast - though it's expected to have minimal impact on Maryland's coast.

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If you stare at a map of where hurricanes have made landfall in the United States since 1851, you'll notice an enormous void over the Mid-Atlantic coast. Virginia, Maryland and Delaware have never been directly struck. Southern New Jersey has only been hit once.

Is there a magical shield protecting the beaches where many Washingtonians vacation and have second homes? Will a hurricane ever directly strike these shores?

It turns out storms usually miss the expanse of coastline from roughly Virginia Beach to Long Beach Island, N.J., because of its geography. Whereas the Outer Banks of North Carolina and southern New England protrude outward into the Atlantic Ocean, the Delmarva Eastern Shore and surroundings are tucked in.

"The Delmarva area is hard for hurricanes to hit both geographically and meteorologically," said Brian McNoldy, Capital Weather Gang's tropical weather expert. "It's a concave part of the coastline and storms that travel that far north are typically curving to the north or northeast. If the Delmarva Peninsula 'stuck out' east of Cape Hatteras, the hurricane landfall map would look quite different there."

Of course, just because a hurricane hasn't made landfall in the Delmarva area in modern records, doesn't mean this region hasn't witnessed hurricane and tropical storm conditions. Numerous storms have made landfall just south of this area in North Carolina, and then passed over it. And then there are remnant storms from the Gulf of Mexico, which unload copious amounts of rain.

Long-time residents no doubt remember storms like Hazel, Agnes, Isabel, Floyd, Irene, and Sandy, none of which were hurricanes when they swept through the area, but still had profound effects on the region.

"An official hurricane landfall is not needed to produce disastrous impacts," McNoldy said. "A strong hurricane just 50 miles offshore won't show up on the landfall map, but would certainly be memorable and destructive. Even a tropical storm is capable of producing major impacts."

Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University and Capital Weather Gang contributor, notes that the National Hurricane Center maintains a database of the states where hurricane conditions have occurred.

"Maryland has been impacted by two hurricanes," said Klotzbach. "One in 1878 and the Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane of 1933. And, while hurricane-force winds may not have occurred, Isabel in 2003 certainly caused damage there as well [it was a tropical storm when it came through]."

Delaware has also twice witnessed hurricane conditions: by the same 1878 storm that impacted Maryland, and in a hurricane in 1903, the one and only to make landfall in southern New Jersey.

Due to its proximity to the Outer Banks, Southeast Virginia more routinely deals with hurricanes, having experienced hurricane conditions 13 times since 1851.

While it is true hurricane and tropical conditions can occur a good distance away from the landfall zone, the most severe impacts of hurricanes, including the strongest winds and most severe coastal flooding, do tend to focus where they come ashore. Does the Delmarva area's absence of direct strikes since 1851 mean it will never witness one's wrath? Not necessarily.

Given the right configuration of weather systems, a hurricane could be steered straight into the Delmarva coast. While not technically a hurricane at landfall, Hurricane Sandy - which roared ashore near Atlantic City, came awfully close to striking Delmarva.

Not to mention, unofficial historical accounts pre-1851 suggest hurricanes have slammed this region head on.

"Although one hasn't hit since 1851, there are records of hurricanes hitting Virginia and the Delmarva Peninsula in 1667, 1683, 1693, 1724, 1785, and 1788. So it can happen," said McNoldy.

In other words, this region shouldn't consider itself immune. It should continue to monitor the tropics and have contingencies for a full hurricane blast.
Related reading Washington's worst five hurricanes and tropical storms Review: The Chesapeake and Potomac hurricane of 1933 Remembering Hurricane Isabel Hurricane Agnes, a look back

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Why a single hurricane has not come ashore in Virginia, Maryland or Delaware since 1851

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If you stare at a map of where hurricanes have made landfall in the United States since 1851, you'll notice an enormous void over the Mid-Atlantic coast. Virginia, Maryland and Delaware have never been directly struck. Southern New Jersey has only been hit once.

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Evolution, Creation, and the Public Schools | The Institute for Creation Research

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(4) Many teachers and administrators are quite willing to present both viewpoints, but have been unaware that there does exist a solid scientific case for creation, and, therefore, they don't know how to do this. There is thus a great need for teachers, room libraries, and school libraries to be supplied with sound creationist literature.

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A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in . Creationist teachers don't even need to be sneaky about it-the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach "alternatives" to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or scholarship programs. As the map below illustrates, creationism in schools isn't restricted to schoolhouses in remote villages where the separation of church and state is considered less sacred. If you live in any of these states, there's a good chance your tax money is helping to convince some hapless students that evolution (the basis of all modern biological science, supported by everything we know about geology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields) is some sort of highly contested scientific hypothesis as credible as "God did it."

Click to enlarge. For the full interactive map, use a device with a larger screen.

Tax-funded creationism

Arkansas: Responsive Education Solutions operates two campuses in Arkansas that use creationist curricula.(See Texas.)

Correction, Jan. 27, 2014: This article's headlines originally suggested that thousands of public schools in Louisiana and Tennessee are teaching creationism. While those schools are permitted to teach creationism, it is unclear how many are actually teaching it, and the headlines have been updated to reflect this.

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A Map of Thousands of Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism With Taxpayer Money

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A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in . Creationist teachers don't even need to be sneaky about it-the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach "alternatives" to evolution.

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A spring thunderstorm left parts of Hampton Roads and Northeastern North Carolina windblown and under water Friday.

The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for much of the morning, and Virginia Beach and parts of North Carolina were under a tornado warning. Severe thunderstorm warnings were issued as well, but they were short-lived.

Mostly, the area was just drenched in rain.

Reports of flooding in Virginia Beach included the Windsor Woods neighborhood, which is still recovering from flooding during Hurricane Matthew, and nearby Rosemont Road, where at least the northbound side was impassable.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel restricted speeds and imposed level 4 restrictions during the storm, which meant only cars and pickup trucks without exterior cargo mini-vans and SUVs could cross, but not tractor-trailers.

When the tornado warning for Virginia Beach was issued after 8 a.m., school buses were picking up students, so instead of continuing on their routes, they went to the nearest school and the students sheltered from the storm.

North Carolina seemed to get the brunt of it.

Witnesses reported seeing a tornado on Garrenton Island Road in Camden County early in the day, said Christy Saunders, emergency management coordinator for Pasquotank and Camden counties. No damage was found.

The National Weather Service observed cloud rotation in the radar images, indicating the possible presence of a tornado, Saunders said.

In Elizabeth City, a hollow tree fell on a roof on Martin Luther King Drive about 9 a.m., Saunders said. The inhabitants were not injured. The tree fell from straight-line winds, she said.

In the Rocky Hock area, a mobile home was moved from its foundation, windows were blown out of another home and a roof was torn from a produce stand, said Suzanne Stallings, spokeswoman for Chowan County.

The National Weather Service later confirmed it was an EF0 tornado with winds of 70 to 80 mph.

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Storms in Hampton Roads cause flooding and damage

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A spring thunderstorm left parts of Hampton Roads and Northeastern North Carolina windblown and under water Friday. The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for much of the morning, and Virginia Beach and parts of North Carolina were under a tornado warning. Severe thunderstorm warnings were issued as well, but they were short-lived.

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The center of Tropical Storm Cindy will likely be ashore near the Texas-Louisiana border on Thursday. That means very little with such a diffuse system that has already spread a broad area of heavy rain across the southern Gulf Coast, especially east and northeast of the center.

The circulation center of what was Cindy will then get caught in the upper-air flow and make a sweeping northeast then east path that may take it literally over our heads in Southwest Virginia by Friday evening. That also doesn't necessarily mean anything extraordinary for us, though recent soggy weather has left us susceptible to some flooding risk, and we will likely see rain between Thursday evening and early Saturday, possibly an inch or more in many locations.

First, much of Cindy's moisture will likely sweep north and northeastward into the Ohio Valley, where it will bump into a cold front. This may have the effect of focusing the heaviest rainfall to our west and northwest. Unfortunately, this may mean parts of West Virginia will be in the core of the heaviest rainfall a year to the day after the deadly and devastating June 23, 2016, floods. This is very unlikely to be that kind of historic event, but just the potential for some flooding and having heavy rain on that exact date may make it spooky day for West Virginians.

Cindy's remnant circulation will be broad and diffuse. There may be just enough spin to somewhat raise the risk of a rotating thunderstorm that could spin out a strong wind gust or even an isolated tornado, but the risk doesn't look as great as it sometimes does with an inland tropical system. Cindy as a circulating entity may be undetectable by Friday.

It will also be speeding through, not lollygagging around and repeatedly spinning moisture against a stalled front and the higher terrain like our most extreme tropical flooding events (think Juan in 1985) have done over the years.

So there are many reasons to think Cindy will bring us a period of showers starting Thursday evening and extending as late as Saturday morning, but that it will not bring the Roanoke and New River valleys and Southwest Virginia extreme flooding that often occurs here with the inland remnants of tropical systems. BUT ... you can never say never, it's still a relatively concentrated area of tropical moisture, and inland tropical systems often do things they're not expected to do.

There may be some flood watches and possibly warnings over the next couple of days as the moisture increases and showers return but solid reasons to believe flooding won't widespread or devastating. And Saturday may even turn into a decent day, with the rain pulling away with whatever's left of the circulation center racing past and a cold front pushing through.

Some cooler than normal weather and quite dry may be on tap for next week.

Contact Kevin Myatt at kevin.myatt@roanoke.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevinmyattwx.

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TS Cindy likely means rain for SW Va, but flooding risk not extreme

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The center of Tropical Storm Cindy will likely be ashore near the Texas-Louisiana border on Thursday. That means very little with such a diffuse system that has already spread a broad area of heavy rain across the southern Gulf Coast, especially east and northeast of the center.

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Primary Source Analysis Tool | Teachers - Library of Congress

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Free online tool allows students to record responses to a primary source, and e-mail or print their work. Prompts help students to observe, reflect, question and further investigate the primary source. Part of the Teachers section at the Library of Congress.