A Look Behind the Long Range Hurricane Season Forecasts

We start off the discussion of recent active weather patterns across the U.S. with cold rain and snow in California, windy red flag fire warnings across the plains, tornados from Oklahoma up through the Ohio Valley, and an extremely wet start of the month of April on the east coast and mid-Atlantic region.

We also touch on the recent earthquake in Taiwan which was the worst they had in the past 25 years. We remarked on the amazing pictures of leaning buildings that did not completely collapse. Becky DePodwin, our emergency management expert, made note that after the last bad quake, local building codes were upgraded which may have had an impact on survivability of the quake.

Finally, we jump into an in depth look at what goes into a long range hurricane forecast. With such a distant outlook, how do forecasters make their decisions about the whole season this far ahead of time. Our meteorologist, Dan DePodwin, joins us to share his expertise about distant forecasting.

Both AccuWeather and the Colorado State University forecasts agree we should expect a very active season for 2024. Both predict 23-25 named storms, 8-12 hurricanes, and 4-8 major hurricanes with 4-6 direct landfall in the U.S.

The episode was co-hosted by Sam Bradley and Jamie Davis.

Thank you as always to Paragon Medical Education Group for their long-term support of the Disaster Podcast. Dr. Joe Holley and the team at Paragon continue to provide excellent and customized disaster response training to jurisdictions around the U.S. and internationally as well.