THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 8, 1995 TAG: 9506080450
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
Allison's stormy passage this week carried ill winds that warned of a coming hurricane season that could be one of the worst ``since the late 1980s,'' a nationally known weather expert said Wednesday.
``Climatological conditions appear right to produce eight hurricanes - including three major hurricanes - along with 12 tropical storms for the season that began June 1,'' said William Mason Gray, a Colorado State University weather scientist.
Gray, whose long-range hurricane forecasts have won him an international reputation, said he ``expects to see much more activity this season than in previous years'' along the Atlantic coast.
The Colorado State professor said this summer's ``hurricane destruction potential'' has a predicted rating of 162 percent of normal for the 1995 season. A typical year has a damage rating of 68, he said.
In the past two decades, Gray has developed a meteorological formula for figuring the odds on hurricanes in advance, based on global climate patterns.
He emphasizes that he doesn't know where the storms are likely to hit.
When Gray first started cranking out his computer-generated storm forecasts, National Weather Service meteorologists tended to be skeptical. But Gray's increasingly accurate predictions have won him worldwide respect.
The three factors that most influence the number and severity of Atlantic hurricanes, Gray believes, are the direction of high altitude winds near the Equator; rainfall amounts in West Africa and the presence or absence of an El Nino off the coast of South America.
El Nino is the name given by Peruvian fishermen to an upswelling of warm water from the far western Pacific that periodically moves east to the coast of South America. The name means ``The Boy Child'' in Spanish and was given to El Nino because the phenomenon usually occurs around Christmastime.
In a seasonal update of his first 1995 hurricane forecast last November, Gray said Wednesday that all of his indicators point to a witch's brew of turbulent summer weather in the eastern Atlantic Ocean that could spawn at least ``35 hurricane days and 65 tropical storm days.'' Gray classifies a hurricane day as a six-hour period when winds reach 74 mph and a tropical storm day as a similar time period in which winds reach 39 mph.
``The long-anticipated dissipation of El Nino should occur this spring and early summer,'' Gray said in his June 7 update, ``The end of drought for the Sahel region in West Africa and the forecast for westerly direction of stratospheric winds all point to increased activity.''
El Nino's warm waters displace normally cold currents along the Peruvian shore and, in a poorly understood way, this seems to reduce the number of hurricanes formed thousands of miles away in the eastern Atlantic. El Ninos rarely last more than two years.
``In 1994 El Nino stayed in place for a fourth consecutive year,'' Gray noted this week, ``That hasn't happened in this century. But recently collected data indicate El Nino's stay is ending.''
The likelihood of increasing high altitude westerly winds and the departure of El Nino, coupled with rainfall in the normally dry regions of West Africa, almost certainly means a bad year for hurricanes, Gray said.
Hurricanes are rated on a Safir-Simpson severity scale of one to five, and Gray thinks there will be at least three Category Three or higher storms this year.
Category Threes and above are considered intense and have maximum sustained winds of 115 miles an hour or greater,'' Gray said.
``Hurricane Allison, at its height, was only a weak Category One hurricane,'' said Gray. No category Three, Four or Five storm occurred in 1994, he added, by way of emphasizing his ominous forecast of three of the severe storms this year.
Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew both were Category Four storms when they came ashore, Gray said.
Gray made only small changes in his first forecast for 1995, issued last November. In his update this week, he reduced to six from eight the number of expected ``intense'' hurricane days this summer. But he also increased his earlier estimate of this year's likely hurricane ``destruction potential from 85 to 110.''
Gray's final box score for last year's actual storms, compared with his 1994 forecast was pretty good: He predicted seven named hurricanes in 1994 and there were seven; he called for 12 ``hurricane days'' and there were seven.
KEYWORDS: HURRICANE 1995 SEASON by CNB