I mentioned back in March that the private meteorologists at AccuWeather are claiming they have pioneered a technique for doing something that neither the National Hurricane Center nor the esteemed Dr. William Gray at Colorado State have ever seriously attempted: predicting in advance the specific regions that are most likely to be hit by landfalling hurricanes in a given year. “AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center research meteorologists have identified weather cycles that indicate which U.S. coastal areas are most susceptible to landfalls,” according to a press release quoted in that post. “Determination of where we are in the cycle has enabled AccuWeather.com meteorologists to accurately predict hurricane activity in Florida in 2004 and along the Gulf Coast last year.” [UPDATE: In comments, Charles Fenwick links to AccuWeather’s actual pre-2005 prediction, in which they highlighted the risk to Florida, the Carolinas and New England — not the Gulf Coast. He also points out that Colorado State has had a “Landfalling Hurricane Probability Project” since 2004.]

So, what are they predicting for this year? Well, as noted in March, they are extremely concerned about the potential for a landfall in the Northeastern U.S., either the New York/New Jersey area or New England. This map shows the predicted probability of hurricane strikes, compared to the average annual risk, in the various coastal areas:

“The greatest overall threat of a landfall will be on the Carolina coastline, but the greatest elevated threat, in relationship to averages, will be in New England,” this article explains. It also goes into more detail about why the forecasters think the Northeast is at greater-than-usual risk, and concludes: “Where we are in the decadal cycle, the influence of the cycle we have identified within this decadal cycle, and significantly warmer-than-normal northwestern Atlantic waters, all contribute to the increasing threat of a hurricane of the magnitude of 1938, 1944, and 1954 — perhaps even stronger. This current cycle of above-normal Atlantic basin activity has so far spared the Northeast, especially New England. However, we are entering a stage where one or two major Northeast hurricanes are of great concern within the next 10 years and, this year, the ingredients look ominous.”

This press release even provides a timetable for what we might expect this season:

“The 2006 season will be a creeping threat,” said Bastardi. “Early in the season — June and July — the Texas Gulf Coast faces the highest likelihood of a hurricane strike, possibly putting Gulf energy production in the line of fire. As early as July, and through much of the rest of the season, the highest level of risk shifts to the Carolinas. From mid-August into early October, the window is open for hurricane strikes to spread northward to the more densely populated Northeast coast. At the very end of the season, southern Florida also faces significant hurricane risk.”

“There are few areas of the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico that will not be in the bull’s eye at some point this season,” said Ken Reeves, AccuWeather’s Director of Forecast Operations. Ironically, though, the region that was hammered the hardest last year — the central and eastern Gulf Coast — has one of the lower probabilities of receiving another major hurricane strike in 2006.”

Added Reeves, “This is not to say that hard-hit New Orleans has nothing to worry about. Because the city’s defenses have been so compromised by Hurricane Katrina, even a glancing blow from a hurricane elsewhere could spell trouble for the city.” …

Said AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center Meteorologist Bernie Rayno, “With the exception of the southern tip of the Florida peninsula, almost all the damage wrought by last year’s storms in the U.S. occurred along the Gulf Coast. In recent history, it is the Gulf coast and the East Coast from the Carolinas southward that have borne the brunt of U.S. hurricane strikes. Because of this, people may be unaware that portions of the Northeast coast have been severely damaged by major hurricanes in the past, and that there is a dramatically increased likelihood that over the next five years the Northeast could be hit by a major hurricane. This could be the year.”

Rayno also noted that in general, the fast-moving nature of tropical cyclones in the Northeast will leave little time to protect property and lives. “Preparation is the key, since time is a perishable commodity when a hurricane is approaching the coast.”

Added Bastardi, “Because it has been decades since the Northeast was hit by a major hurricane, some residents in the Northeast have become complacent regarding the threat of a hurricane. It is for this reason that we have been warning of elevated danger from hurricanes in the Northeast since March, when we first identified that patterns that could lead to such an occurrence this year or in the near future.”

A hurricane making landfall in, or just southwest of, New York City, would be very, very bad. Indeed, if you’d asked me a couple of years ago which three major cities were most at risk of a true hurricane catastrophe, I would have said New Orleans, Miami and New York. Previous posts about “the NYC nightmare” here and here.

Hurricane season starts in just over two weeks, on June 1.

P.S. What I wrote in the second above-linked “NYC nightmare” post bears repeating:

The fact that such a hurricane would likely be moving so much faster than, say, Katrina, thus decreasing the preparation time, only makes it worse. Even a competent evacuation effort (as opposed to a Nagin-esque effort) might be woefully inadequate! The evacuation orders would need to be issued while the hurricane is waaay down south, off the Carolinas or even Georgia or Florida. The forecast would be, by its nature, extremely uncertain. And would New Yorkers, unused to hurricanes, take such an evacuation order seriously? I’m not sure.

You may recall that I had concerns about Wilma in this regard. At the time, Bryan Woods from The Storm Track accused me of fear-mongering: “There is a tropical system south of Cuba and you are talking about a landfall in New England?” I responded, “I just think it’s worth noting that this is a possibility, especially because, as I said, if it does happen, it will happen very quickly, and New Englanders/New Yorkers will be caught off-guard if they aren’t thinking about it before landfall in Florida. But, as I said, it’s unlikely to happen.” And, of course, it didn’t happen. But someday it will, and I was right about the “very quickly” business. Striking the right balance and making the right decision in preparing for this particular Big One, whenever it happens, is going to be really, really hard.

P.P.S. Not like New England needs a hurricane to cause serious flooding. In the great state of New Hampshire — where a hurricane landfall is quite unlikely, barring an extremely odd track bringing a storm ashore in Portsmouth :) — as well as Massachusetts and Maine, they’re having the worst flooding in decades, and it promises to get worse before it gets better. Dr. Jeff Masters has a cumulative Doppler radar image:

Yikes.

Meanwhile, in other hurricane-related news, the Eastern Pacific tropical season got underway on Monday. And out in the Western Pacific, the season’s first typhoon, Chanchu, is threatening Hong Kong and environs in China. It’s a Category 4, according to Dr. Masters, and is the strongest storm ever to threaten the city in the month of May, according to the AP. But Masters points out that “it is not unusual to get a supertyphoon in May, and this last happened in 2004, when Supertyphoon Nida reached Category 5 status with sustained winds of 160 mph.”

P.P.P.S. If anyone was wondering — which I’m sure no one was — why a blogger who is best known for his hurricane coverage doesn’t have a hurricane-related blog category more specific than “Weather, Natural Disasters, Space & Astronomy,” it’s because I simply haven’t had time yet to organize my old posts into a more fitting category scheme. Eventually, “Weather & Natural Disasters” will be a separate category from “Space & Astronomy,” and the former will have a subcategory specifically for “Hurricanes,” which will in turn have sub-subcategories like “2005 Hurricane Season” and “2006 Hurricane Season,” and sub-sub-subcategories like “Hurricane Katrina,” “Hurricane Rita,” etc. But, as you can imagine, it’s going to take a ton of legwork to get all that organized, precisely because of how many posts I have on the relevant topics. It was pretty easy to create a “Britney Spears” category out of whole cloth, because I only had 31 posts to re-categorize, and I could easily find them all by searching for the word “Britney.” Similarly, creating subcategories for “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings” within “Sci-Fi & Fantasy” wasn’t all that difficult, and made for a nice study break a few days ago when I did it. :) But breaking up my weather posts into a more coherent organization will be significantly more difficult, especially because it involves categorizing, for the first time ever, my hundreds of hurricane-related posts from 2005, which were created during the interim period when I was on Blogger and thus didn’t have categories at all. However, it is something I intend to do in the next few weeks, once I get settled out in Phoenix. So, stay tuned.