As a surfer in New Jersey, I grew up following low pressure systems, predicting wind direction, listening to weather radios and trying to set myself up for good waves at the right spot with the right wind direction. Then, I moved out to California and all that changed. The weather is the same every day, the swells we got were ground swells (generated far away by storm systems over the ocean) and the winds were relatively predictable.
Well, I’m back in the ‘prediction’ mode because it’s that time of the year again on the Eastern Seaboard (and in Rincon PR), it’s Hurricane Season in the Atlantic!
A few days ago, a storm system moved off of the coast of West Africa and the Cape Verde islands and almost immediately formed into a tropical depression. On July 3rd, it was upgraded to a Tropical Storm and named Bertha. The way the high pressure systems and water temperatures are set up combined with the hurricane center prediction, it looks like Tropical Storm Bertha may become a hurricane, but will most likely travel far North of Puerto Rico and dissipate over the Atlantic. We’ll have to stay tuned to find out.
Tropical Storm Bertha
2008 Atlantic Hurricane Storm Names
Did you know that the National Weather service and National Hurricane Center has a list of Hurricane names ready at the beginning of every season? They started a list of names in 1953 to limit the confusion associated with describing hurricanes and storms by their longitude and latitude coordinates. That list, originally all womens names but now includes mens names, is rotated every six years and now maintained by the World Meteorological Organization. The only reason a name won’t be rotated is if it was a storm that was so devastating, it shouldn’t be used again (Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Felix, Hurricane Dean, Hurricane Katrina).
Here is the list of storm names for 2008:
- Arthur
- Bertha
- Cristobal
- Dolly
- Edouard
- Fay
- Gustav
- Hanna
- Ike
- Josephine
- Kyle
- Laura
- Marco
- Nana
- Omar
- Paloma
- Rene
- Sally
- Teddy
- Vicky
- Wilfred