The National Hurricane Center’s first Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook of 2006 has just been issued, meaning the Atlantic hurricane season is officially underway. Excerpt:

TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
530 AM EDT THU JUN 01 2006

FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC…CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO…

TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED THROUGH FRIDAY.

TODAY MARKS THE FIRST DAY OF THE ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON…WHICH WILL RUN UNTIL NOVEMBER 30TH.

That’s from Forecaster Beven. He then proceeds to go through the list of names for the coming season, followed by a summary of the various NHC advisory products. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid. But the bottom line is, the season has begun.

As I pointed out before, this is really an arbitrary milestone. The statistical likelihood of tropical storm formation increased only infinitesimally, if at all, between yesterday and today. Still, we’ve now officially crossed that imaginary line in the sand, and there’s no going back — at least not until November 30.

Dmytro from NDLS called me a few hours ago and left me a voicemail wishing me a “Happy Hurricane Season.” Heh.

Here is The Storm Track’s post kicking off the season. Bryan minces no words:

Ready or not, Hurricane Season 2006 is here! What will this year have in store? Some fear mongers from AccuWeather (*cough* Bastardi *cough*) want nothing more than media attention and will pray on your fear to get it. (I can say that. Many thanks to State of Connecticut for extending journalism protections to the Internet.) Insurance companies, especially those based overseas and free of domestic political pressure, are cancelling policies up and down the East Coast as they are finally recognizing that hurricane losses are exceeding official government estimates. Did I mention that the National Weather Service is part of the Executive Branch?

He goes on to say, “I would not want to own property on the Outer Banks this year,” and then takes a look at the potential for tropical development right now, given the sea-surface temperatures. (Tropical-storm activity is possible over a wide area, but only the northern Caribbean has warm water deep enough to “support real hurricane activity” at the moment. That’s pretty typical for June.)

Speaking of “typical for June,” Charles Fenwick points out that “even with all of the above average activity [since 1995], on average, the first tropical storm didn’t form until 30 days into the season, and the first hurricane didn’t form until 63 days into the season.” He shares my concern that all this unprecedented start-of-hurricane-season hype may cause a backlash if nothing much happens in the tropics over the next few weeks… which would not be at all unusual, nor necessarily indicative of a less-active-than-expected rest of the season.

Anyway… stay tuned for hurricane coverage here on the Irish Trojan’s Blog throughout the season. I’ll be doing my share of weather-blogging (when I’m not at work) over the coming months, especially once there are active storms out there, but in addition to that, I’m hoping to introduce my new “hurricane guestbloggers” within the next few days. And of course, you should be sure to peruse my list of links at top right. In particular, Fenwick and Dr. Jeff Masters are superstars when it comes to cogent analysis of the storms once they form. It was their blog posts, in addition to the computer models and NHC advisories, that really provided the source material for much of my Katrina-blogging last year. They deserve more credit than they’ve gotten for “sounding the alarm” just as vigorously as I was. And unlike me, they actually have the meteorological education to prove they know what they’re talking about! :) Anyway, I highly advise reading their blogs if you want to know what’s going on in the tropics. The Storm Track, too, and the others linked in my right sidebar.

P.S. Oh, and one other thing I wanted to mention. The Weather Channel is airing the “lost episode” of “It Could Happen Tomorrow” — the one they filmed before Katrina about the hypothetical New Orleans doomsday scenario — on Sunday at 9:00 PM Eastern and Pacific. Should be interesting.

P.P.S. With regard to my hurricane blogroll… if anyone has any suggestions for worthwhile sites that I’m missing, please leave them in comments!