Tropical wave detected in Atlantic — weeks before hurricane season really begins
The first tropical wave of the season was just identified in the Atlantic Ocean — weeks before the start of this year's hurricane season.
Currently moving just west of Africa, large-scale low-pressure systems similar to this may lead to the formation of a tropical cyclone.
'The axis of a tropical wave is near 26W, to the south of 15N, moving west at around 11 mph. Nearby convection is noted in the monsoon trough and Intertropical Convergence Zone section,' forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said in their Tuesday update. Convection is a critical part of storm formation that sends warm air and moisture into the atmosphere.
This one, however, is not expected to threaten the U.S. or develop any further. That's due to a dry and dusty air mass in its path, WFTV 9 said.
Other areas of the Atlantic closer to the U.S. are quiet just 11 days before the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season on June 1.
In fact, it may even be eerily quiet, according to Philip Klotzbach, a Colorado State University meteorologist specializing in Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts.
"Five other years since 1950 have had zero Northern Hemisphere named storms through May 15: 1973, 1983, 1984, 1998, and 2024," he wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
'The latest first named storm in the Northern Hemisphere since 1950 was in 1973. Ava formed in the eastern North Pacific on June 2 that year,' he noted.
Since 2003, there have been 15 tropical cyclones that have formed before June 1, according to the Pensacola News Journal. Of those, 11 formed in May.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from the beginning of June through November 30.
This season may be less active than last year, which saw the destructive Hurricane Helene and Milton. June's Hurricane Beryl was the earliest Category 5 storm on record in the Atlantic.
The first named storm of the 2025 season will be Andrea.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will release its forecast for the season on Thursday. Forecasters at AccuWeather say the first storm could happen before the official start of the season.
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An ambitious project to weaken or divert hurricanes generated decades of suspicion and disagreement. What did we learn – and will it ever be revived? As a grad student in the 1960s, Joe Golden flew on about a dozen of missions into the "eyewall" of a hurricane, where winds of 160mph (260km/h) battered the sides of his propeller-powered plane. "You could think of it as a ring of thunderstorms that often tower over 40,000ft [12,200m]," says Golden, who photographed hurricanes and gathered data on their development. "And it can also have frequent lightning in it," he adds, matter-of-factly. "So that's another hazard." Crews on the "hurricane hunting" flights padded their planes' cabin and learned to never ignore orders to strap in when penetrating the wall. But meteorologist Hugh Willoughby recalls thrilling "white-knuckle" flights, including one when life rafts and safety equipment crashed against the ceiling when the plane began falling about 200ft (60m), its engine flaming out. 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If so, perhaps it could be disrupted, calming the storm's vicious force. Six decades after its first flights – and 42 years since it was cancelled – Stormfury veterans Golden and Willoughby remember a project that gave us vital knowledge that has helped to save lives. But along with this, US attempts to control storms have left behind a controversial legacy that has fueled distrust and conspiracy theories, with some unanswered questions that linger today. From nuclear weapons to hurricane experiments Both Golden and Willoughby recall that weather modification projects emerged at a time of enormous optimism following the end of World War Two, when there was a widespread perception that there was no limit to what science could achieve. In the background was the nuclear bomb, says Kristine Harper, professor of history and sciences at the University of Copenhagen. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was expectation that constructive uses of atomic energy would follow, from nuclear power to " atomic gardening" that used radioactive substances to breed new mutant crops. In 1946, newspaper and radio stations speculated that nuclear weapons might soon safeguard us from acts of God, recounts Harper in her book Make It Rain, an account of the US government's attempts at weather control. One New York Times article asked whether atomic energy "by its explosive force" could divert hurricanes away from cities. "You know, maybe we could destroy hurricanes with nuclear bombs?" laughs Harper. (This is not a good idea, meteorologists have repeatedly clarified.) Early efforts to explore weather control were backed by veterans of the Manhattan Project, including John von Neumann and the so-called "father of the H-bomb" Edward Teller. But the most important breakthrough arrived, instead, inside a small, adapted freezer. At the research laboratory at US firm General Electric run by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, experiments had shown it might be possible to induce rain in clouds, by releasing substances that would cause supercooled water in the clouds to crystallise into snowflakes. To test this "cloud seeding" technology in the field, Langmuir's assistant dropped dry ice out of the window of a single-engine airplane into a cloud hanging over western Massachusetts in November 1946. Langmuir was watching through binoculars from the ground below as snow began to fall in autumn toward a mountain called Mount Greylock. "This is history!" he cried down the phone to reporters, according to Caesar's Last Breath: The Epic Story of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. At a time when many dreamed they might soon "be able to choose their weather much as they chose a radio station", writes Harper, the era of weather control appeared to be startlingly close at hand. How to weaken a hurricane Although little was known at the time about hurricane structure and behaviour, the US Navy and Army agreed to collaborate with Langmuir's lab on Project Cirrus, which aimed to understand if cloud seeding technology might be able to help extinguish hurricanes at birth, divert them off-course, or else weaken deadly tropical cyclones before they hit land. Data gathered by weather balloons and aircraft indicated that hurricane clouds might contain large quantities of supercooled water, like the cloud Langmuir had seeded. During the hurricane season of 1947, on October 13, he convinced a navy crew to drop 80kg (200lb) of dry ice into an ice crusher in the belly of a B-17 bomber, sprinkling powder into a hurricane crossing Florida. This would be the historic first attempt to use this technology to modify a tropical cyclone. Although the adapted World War Two bombers did not have the technology to precisely target areas of the hurricane, their mission was enough to encourage the project's directors. Flying in a B-17 half-a-mile behind the seeding plane, a US Navy meteorologist observed overcast clouds turned into snowfall, noting the hurricane appeared to undergo "pronounced modification", recounts Fixing The Sky by Jim Flemming. But in the days after, the unexpected happened. The hurricane that had been heading out harmlessly to sea, swerved from its course. Hitching westward, toward shore, it smashed the city of Savannah, Georgia, resulting in one recorded death and damage estimated at millions of dollars. Despite no firm evidence, Langmuir said he was "99% sure" the storm had changed course due to the seeding. Stormfury's goal Fears among the public and questions from meteorologists plagued Project Cirrus until it ended in 1952. But the US military maintained a strong interest in storm modification as their involvement in the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, says Harper. "The Navy had a secret programme out at China Lake Naval Air Station [in California] where they were working on seeding techniques or weather-control techniques that were going to be used in Laos in Vietnam," she says. These classified missions, codenamed Operation Popeye, aimed to develop a "weather weapon" that could seed rain storms to wash out the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese military supply line. For these efforts, says Harper, a civilian programme to research weather modification would provide the "perfect cover". According to Stormfury's working hypothesis, by seeding the area just outside the eye wall with silver iodide, they could cause clouds to form a second eyewall, which in turn would compete with the inner eye wall. If they could make an eyewall to reform at a greater width, they expected that they would slow the hurricane's speed, Harper explains – like an ice skater extending their arms to slow their twirl. Noaa "If they could reduce the wind speed by 10% or so, that could make a difference in the category of intensity at landfall," says Willoughby, who started out flying storm-monitoring missions in the Pacific for the US Navy during the early 1970s. If a 100mph (160 km/h) wind could be slowed to (80km/h), it would actually lose 75% of its force. Hurricane Esther would provide the crucial test for the theory. Emerging around the islands of Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) in September 1961, the storm was becoming more intense as it swept through the Atlantic, about 400 miles (640km) north of Puerto Rico. On 16 September, an aircraft belonging to the US Weather Bureau flew through Esther's eyewall and dropped eight canisters of silver iodide into the raging winds. 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The Navy's exit was in part because they no longer needed to test it, says Harper: "They were using the techniques in Vietnam and Laos – they didn't need to test them in the Atlantic anymore on hurricanes." Figures revealed in the Pentagon Papers in 1974 showed a far less cautious use of silver iodide and similar compounds in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, where Air Force and Navy planes dropped in a total of 47,409 canisters in 2,600 seeding missions. In total, Stormfury's seeding flights had dropped canisters of silver iodide into four hurricanes on eight different days. Data across these flights found that on four days, winds reduced, falling in wind-speed by between 10% or more. Other days, nothing happened, which was blamed on flights failing to hit targets or poorly chosen storms. With few candidate storms in the Atlantic, during the 1970s, the US attempted to strike deals with Australia and the Philippines to run further tests on storms in the Pacific Ocean, off their coastlines. 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"Frankly, to my mind, the experiment did not seem to be well-thought-out in those later days," he says. Writing the final evaluation of the project in 1985, Willougby concluded that despite the team's determined efforts, "the expected results of seeding are often indistinguishable from naturally occurring intensity changes". Did Stormfury fail? To all involved, it was clear that Stormfury was never a normal meteorological study – instead, an experiment that began "at the wrong end", according to the Navy's project leader Pierre St Amand, quoted in Make it Rain. Because of the project's military value, and potential impact on civilian safety, Stormfury received millions of dollars in funding and support that most meteorological studies can only imagine. At the same time, hurricane science was still in its infancy, with not enough known to make accurate predictions about their interior structure and behaviour. "There was a germ of science," Harper summarises. 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21 hours ago
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