US: September 5, 2007


MIAMI - A noted hurricane forecasting team at Colorado State University said on Tuesday it expected the rest of the 2007 Atlantic storm season to be above-average, maintaining its prediction of a total of 15 named storms.


As top-ranked Category 5 Hurricane Felix slammed into Nicaragua and Honduras, the team formed by hurricane forecasting pioneer William Gray and now led by Phil Klotzbach said there would be five storms, of which four would become hurricanes, in September alone. Felix counted as one of them.

Another five named storms, of which two would strengthen into hurricanes, could be expected in October and November, the final two months of the six-month season, they said.

Felix was the second Category 5 hurricane of the season, which began on June 1. Hurricane Dean in August also reached the potentially catastrophic and usually rare top rank on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.

Atlantic sea surface temperatures are around normal and there were some signs of La Nina conditions forming in the Pacific, the Colorado State University forecasters said.

An unusual cooling of Pacific waters, a La Nina event, tends to mean that atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic are favorable for the formation of hurricanes. Its opposite, called El Nino, tends to inhibit storm formation in the Atlantic.

"We continue to anticipate that the 2007 Atlantic basin tropical cyclone season will be more active than the average 1950-2000 season," Klotzbach and Gray concluded.


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE