The family is heading to Florida at the end of July - not quite the heart of hurricane season, but there is definitely a risk.

I thought I would take a look at google to find out what to expect.  First I encountered the official position: 2008 is likely to be normal or above normal - a 90% chance of either, and only a 10% chance of below normal.

What is normal?  11 named storms, with around 6 hurricanes in the North Atlantic.

I then checked out this neat page which looks specifically at storms that have hit Orlando (guess where we’re going?)  Nicely broken down into 30 year increments, suggesting that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is largely responsible for whether or not a hurricane hits Orlando.  Still, even in peak periods, the odds of a hurricane hitting Orlando are pretty low - 1 in every 3 or 4 years.  (This is low because if you’re only going for a week, and hurricane season has about 20 weeks, then basic math tells you the odds of a hurricane hitting the same week you’re there is 1 in 60-80.  You wouldn’t take those odds on an NFL team winning the Superbowl… so why worry about a storm?)

But then I thought, what do the experts know?  In the same chain of google hits I encountered this CTV report from May 2006 - “Major Hurricane Season Brewing in the Atlantic“.

In what could signal a frightening new fact of life in the age of global warming, Canadian and U.S. forecasters are warning that another major hurricane season is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean.

…”Last year we were looking at 12 to 15 storms and this year the forecast is for about 17. No one would go out on a limb and say it is going to be just as bad as last year, but the indications are there that it is still going to be another active season, almost twice as active as normal.”

Last year’s hurricane season was the most destructive on record.

Sounds scary right?  Especially mixed in with all the panicky global warming jargon.

Then right there on the same google page, I have Wikipedia’s 2006 storm season. 

“It was less active than the previous year’s Atlantic hurricane season; the first since 2001 in which no hurricanes made landfall in the United States; and the first since 1994 that no tropical cyclones formed during October.^[1]“

Hmm.  If they were sensationalizing that much in 2006, I think we have to ask ourselves, what else are they sensationalizing?

I will say this: it wasn’t the NOAA that issued the breathless notice for panic - it was the Associated Press.  But I am still not worried.  Kind of makes you think though doesn’t it?