Sounds a bit extreme, don’t you think? There are some out there in the private forecasting community who think the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season will be one for the record books. Of course, it’s not impossible. However, the problem with this line of thinking is that predictions for extreme outcomes — like for ‘extreme’ hurricane seasons — are often not useful when the predictions themselves are only slightly better than climatology.

To be sure, our science has progressed to the level at which it is indeed possible to make a forecast for next year’s Atlantic hurricane activity that is superior to the forecast for just an average season. The team of hurricane forecasters from Colorado State University has demonstrated this in recent years. Their predictions provide a nontrivial advantage over the “average” forecast. This is quite an achievement, especially when you consider the fact that the Atlantic basin has the largest year-to-year variability of any of the global tropical cyclone basins. But we still need to be wary of forecasts for tail events (ones on the edges of the probability distribution), particularly when it comes to hurricanes.

As far as this upcoming season is concerned, there are some early signs that suggest there will be more hurricanes than normal. One is the unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the main development region in the tropical Atlantic. Another is the expected decline of El Nino (and the reduction of vertical wind shear associated with its demise). Since wind shear tends to tear hurricanes apart, less wind shear can help promote a more favorable environment for storms to grow. A wild card in all of this, and perhaps one of the stronger predictors, is the MJO, or Madden Julian Oscillation. The MJO is a tropical disturbance that can modulate the likelihood of hurricane genesis for weeks at a time. Unfortunately, there is no clear indication yet how the MJO might set up during the upcoming season. I think we’ll have to wait until early summer before hurricane forecasters will have a reasonably confident picture of how extreme this season will be.