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...terrible, two-decade drought that plagued the African Sahel until lately also cut down on tropical storms, says Gray. Strong winds that accompanied this prolonged dry spell swept rain clouds away from the Sahel and sheared the tops off storm systems that might eventually have become hurricanes. Now that the drought has eased, these storms are more likely to persist and grow...
OTHER FACTORS-VARIATIONS IN ocean temperatures and in high-altitude prevailing winds-are also involved. Nobody can say with any certainty why these me teorological influences come and go as they do. Gray favors a mechanism known as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, a vast, and so far poorly understood, undersea current that carries warm water from the Pacific and Indian oceans into the Atlantic. When the conveyor belt runs faster for unknown reasons, there is more warm water available to generate both rain in the Sahel and storms over the North Atlantic. Or so the reasoning goes...
...even though nobody has a handle on the underlying dynamics, the link between far-flung weather patterns and the North American hurricane season appears solid. Indeed, for the past 12 years, Gray has routinely used El Nino, Sahel rainfall and other factors to make impressively accurate predictions. Last October he forecast 12 major tropical storms for 1995, and in early August he upped the number to 16, just five storms shy of the record set in 1933 and more than double the number in 1994. "People thought we'd gone crazy," says Gray. "Now it appears we probably undershot...
While the threat from global warming is purely theoretical, the danger from an old-fashioned, decades-long spate of stormy seasons is real. Gray says we need look back only to the 1950s and '60s, when 21 hurricanes pummeled the U.S., to see what could lie ahead for coastal residents. Those hurricanes took hundreds of lives in the U.S. and thousands in the Caribbean. While lives can be protected by early warning and prompt evacuation, protecting property is another matter. If Hurricane Andrew had veered just 20 miles farther north on its destructive path through South Florida...
Earthquakes may get more press, but hurricanes can be far more destructive. "They are," Gray says, "the biggest natural threat facing the U.S." Nobody can predict whether a given storm will blast through a city or dissipate harmlessly at sea. But it doesn't take an atmospheric scientist to realize that the more storms there are, the greater the danger of disaster...