With less than 24 hours until the Atlantic hurricane season officially gets underway, I have to point something out. It feels very strange, as someone who has been following hurricanes for nearly two decades, to see the near-frenzy surrounding the date June 1. (It reminds me of how I felt, as a long-time political junkie and Electoral College nerd, about the sudden explosion of media interest in the electors’ formal voting process in December 2000.) From the way the media and politicans are talking about it — from the ominous tones in which they refer to “the start of hurricane season” — you’d think that at the stroke of midnight tonight, a bevy of Category Five hurricanes will spontaneously form off the U.S. coast and start moving toward land.

Well, let me make my first Official Weather Nerd Prediction^TM of the 2006 season: that ain’t gonna happen. :)

The fact is, there’s nothing special or magical about the “first day of hurricane season.” Mother Nature, you see, doesn’t own a calendar. Tropical storms can form before June 1 (just as they can form after November 30, as we learned last year). Such “pre-season” tropical storms are, admittedly, rare — but then again, it’s also rare for tropical storms to form in early June! Indeed, if you were to compare the likelihood of storm formation on May 31 versus June 1, the difference would be virtually nil. Like most beginning and ending dates of “seasons,” the boundaries of the hurricane season are fundamentally arbitrary. The climatological reality is that there is a slow climb through the spring and summer toward the peak of tropical activity in mid-September, and then a slow decline from there — not a sudden start and a sudden stop.

Of course, I say all this as someone who loves to observe, document and comment on arbitrary milestones. My parents, who endured my obsessive chronicling of a family car reaching 100,000 miles not once, not twice, but three times (with three different cars), can attest to that, and I’m sure regular blog readers can think of various examples as well (frequent discussion of Daylight Saving Time transitions comes to mind). So I’m not knocking the phenomenon of giving undue weight to utterly arbitrary temporal milestones. I’m just amused that so many people are joining me on this occasion in that peculiar pastime. :)

Anyway, when we all wake up on Thursday, I can think of two things that will be different, hurricane-wise. One, the National Hurricane Center will resume publishing its Tropical Weather Outlook four times a day (and you can bet I’ll post the first one, which I believe will be published at 2:30 AM MST, here on the blog before going to work Thursday morning). Two, the Weather Channel will start broadcasting its “Tropical Update” every hour at :50 after the hour. Both of these developments are very exciting for me personally, but I can’t imagine why anyone else would care. Hehe.

I’m being a bit silly, of course. I understand perfectly well why the “near-frenzy” is occurring. From the media’s perspective, the approach of June 1 is an obvious “hook” to justify publishing long-planned post-Katrina features, back-burner hurricane stories, and scene-setting articles about impending doom (always a favorite journalistic topic, but much more salient than usual after last year). And from the politicians’ and public officials’ perspectives, the official start of the season is an excellent opportunity, in light of heightened public receptiveness because of last year’s disasters, to try and get people’s attention and encourage prudent planning (something I, of course, whole-heartedly support). I just hope people won’t start resting easy or getting complacent — or complaining about “hype” — if the first few weeks of June come and go without any tropical activity whatsoever, which is precisely what climatology tells us is likely to happen.

Then again, you never know. Maybe we’ll have a Hurricane Alberto to worry about right away. The first two months of last season were very active, foreshadowing the insanity that was to come, so it certainly isn’t impossible. Personally, I’m hoping for a long season full of interesting, enchanting, beautiful, powerful hurricanes — that stay safely out to sea.

PLEASE NOTE: The original version of this post stated that the Tropical Weather Outlook is published “once a day at 5:30 AM EDT.” That’s not correct; it’s published four times a day, as this page makes clear. I believe the times are 5:30 and 11:30 AM and PM (4:30 and 10:30 afterDaylight Saving Time ends). Anyway, I apologize for the error.