Hurricane Safety and Preparedness

2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season More Unpredictable Than Usual, As New Outlook Shows

At a Glance

NOAA, The Weather Company and Colorado State University have issued their outlooks for the season.
The 2023 hurricane season outlook is more challenging than usual.
That's because there are a couple of conflicting signals.
First, an El Niño is increasingly likely, which tends to tamp down the number of storms.
However, Atlantic Ocean water is very warm in most areas, which could enhance storms.

Sign up for the Morning Brief email newsletter to get weekday updates from The Weather Channel and our meteorologists.

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season forecast is more unpredictable than usual due to an "unprecedented" combination of two key competing forecast factors.

A new outlook from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center piled onto forecasters' expectations for such a season. The just released outlook calls for between 12 and 17 named storms, 5 to 9 of which become hurricanes and 1 to 4 reaching at least Category 3 status, or a near-average season.

A "near-average" hurricane season might not grab your attention, but two competing factors that will battle for control this year will make it extra important to pay attention to forecasts, as the forecasters at Atmospheric G2 that create The Weather Company's hurricane outlook noted.

"This combination of an incipient El Niño and very warm north Atlantic sea-surface temperatures is unprecedented in the recent record," wrote the AG2 team in their outlook.

If one of those factors dominates, the hurricane season could look quite different than average.

Oh, and by the way, there's actually already been one storm this season. In early May the National Hurricane Center announced retroactively that an unnamed subtropical storm in January had formed, officially kicking off the 2023 season.

A Developing El Niño

The first signal we're watching isn't in the Atlantic Ocean, but rather the waters near the equator in the Pacific Ocean.

These Pacific equatorial waters were cooler than average during the past three hurricane seasons – a condition known as La Niña. But that long-lasting La Niña finally disappeared, and this patch of water is now warming quickly toward its counterpart, El Niño.

As of May, El Niño was a virtual certainty to develop by summer, and various computer forecast models suggested it could become strong by the heart of the hurricane season: August through October.

The reason this strip of water far from the Atlantic Basin matters is that it's one of the strongest influences on hurricane season activity.

In El Niño hurricane seasons, stronger shearing winds often occur over at least the Caribbean Sea and some adjacent parts of the Atlantic Basin. This tends to limit the number and intensity of storms and hurricanes, especially if the El Niño is stronger, as we investigated in a March article.

The AG2 forecast team also noted a tendency in El Niño hurricane seasons for fewer Gulf of Mexico storms and more storms to either curl north, then northeast out into the open Atlantic Ocean or to impact parts of the East Coast.

That's because the Bermuda high tends to be weaker, and it's also due to a more persistent dip in the upper-level winds in the southeastern U.S. during El Niños, according to AG2.

A typical "recurve" pattern that can be in place in hurricane season.

The Atlantic Ocean Is Very Warm

Another factor in this outlook might have the opposite effect of El Niño in 2023.

Hurricane season generally begins when water temperatures reach the rough threshold of 80 degrees, which usually occurs between June 1 and Nov. 30. If other factors are equal, the deeper and warmer ocean water is, the stronger a hurricane can become.

But, according to the AG2 forecast team, Atlantic Basin water temperatures in spring correlate well to a hurricane season's activity.

And much of the Atlantic Basin is warmer than usual for spring, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico and in the eastern Atlantic.

This map shows how far above (yellow, orange and red contours) and below (blue and purple contours) average the Atlantic Ocean was on May 23, 2023.
(NOAA Coral Reef Watch)

What grabbed the AG2 team's attention was how close the overall warmth is right now compared to spring anomalies prior to the prolific 2020 hurricane season.

"(It) certainly gives one pause when relying on the potential El Niño event to keep the season quiet," wrote Crawford and the AG2 team.

Phil Klotzbach, tropical scientist at Colorado State University and head of their forecast team, noted their forecast would have been lower if water temperatures were closer to average due to El Niño.

Prepare The Same Every Hurricane Season

What these outlooks cannot tell you is whether or not your area will get struck this season and when that might happen.

A season with fewer storms or hurricanes can still deliver the one storm that makes a season destructive or devastating.

In 2015, one of the strongest El Niños on record reduced the hurricane tally to four that season. However, one of those was Joaquin, which devastated the central Bahamas.

In this aerial photo, homes are seen under the floodwaters caused by Hurricane Joaquin in the Southern area of Long Island, Bahamas, Monday, Oct. 5, 2015. Joaquin unleashed heavy flooding as it roared through sparsely populated islands in the eastern Bahamas last week, as the Coast Guard searched for crew members of the U.S. container ship El Faro which they concluded sank near the Bahamas during the storm. (AP Photo/Tim Aylen) — In this aerial photo, homes are seen under the floodwaters caused by Hurricane Joaquin in the Southern area of Long Island, Bahamas, Monday, Oct. 5, 2015.
(AP Photo/Tim Aylen)

And it doesn't take a hurricane to be impactful, especially regarding rainfall flooding.

Also in the 2015 season, Tropical Storm Erika was ripped apart by wind shear and dry air near the Dominican Republic. But before that happened, it triggered deadly and destructive flooding in Dominica.

These outlooks serve as a reminder that the time to be ready for hurricanes is now. Information about hurricane preparedness can be found here.

MORE ON WEATHER.COM:

Changes You'll See In Hurricane Forecasts This Season

When The Last 'Quiet' Hurricane Season Happened

Facts About Each Of The 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season Names

'Ian', 'Fiona' Retired As Hurricane Names

2022 Hurricane Season Recap: Florida's Luck Ran Out

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been an incurable weather geek since a tornado narrowly missed his childhood home in Wisconsin at age 7. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.