Islands spared in hurricane season
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer
Hawai'i escaped the 2003 hurricane season with barely a breath of a hurricane — the nearest passed more than 100 miles south of the Islands.
That was largely as predicted, said Jim Weyman, head of the Central Pacific Hurricane Center, an agency of the National Weather Service.
At the start of the season, a dying El Nino weather pattern and incipient La Nina in the Pacific led to Weyman's prediction of possibly two to three tropical cyclones in the Central Pacific.
There were just two:
Hurricane Jimena, which passed south but drenched parts of the Big Island in the first week of September, and Tropical Depression 1C, which never reached hurricane strength.
"Jimena, at times, looked like it could be threatening, but it ended up passing 120 miles south of the Big Island," Weyman said.
The average year sees 4.5 tropical cyclones. The central Pacific had five cyclones in 2002, and four each in 2001 and 2000. In El Ni–o years, which bring warmer equatorial waters and changes in Pacific current and pressure patterns, there are often more storms but drier weather.
La Nina years, with cooler water at the equator, don't necessarily produce the opposite result, but they can. The predicted La Ni–a never fully developed, and Weyman said climate conditions appear to be about average.
"We don't have a full La Nina. It's more neutral," Weyman said.
The neutral pattern is predicted to continue, at least into the start of summer and the hurricane season in the central Pacific, June 1 to Nov. 30.
The weather service's computerized climate models don't give a clear picture of conditions through the rest of next year's hurricane season, Weyman said.
The very wet conditions on most of the islands in the past couple of weeks are not connected with any large-scale climate patterns, Weyman said, but just a normal wet Hawaiian winter re-establishing itself after about six years of unusual dryness.
"Most people don't realize that this is back toward more of a normal kind of winter," he said.
Hawaiian winters generally get their major rainfall by way of passing weather fronts and the unstable conditions meteorologists call Kona lows. The Islands have had some of both recently, he said.
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.
