Speaking today at the SIFMA ILS conference in Miami, Phil Klotzbach, Ph.D., a Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Atmospheric Science of the Colorado State University, provided some insights into what to expect for the coming 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
Klotzbach and his team provide one of the seasonal hurricane forecasts that the insurance, reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) community watches most closely.
His comments are telling, of the potential for an active year. While he also provided some insights that suggest the track of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes in 2024 could prove to be more threatening for losses than seen last year.
“There’s been a lot of discussion already, a lot of excitement about the 2024 hurricane season and one of the big reasons why is because we had El Niño last year which, at least somewhat put the brakes on the season for being too active.
“But that El Niño is going away, I would say right now it’s on life support and certainly likely to be knocked out here in the next couple of months,” Klotzbach explained.
“But if you look at the Atlantic, that’s a lot of very, very dark red and so that record warm Atlantic hasn’t gone anywhere. So the big concern is, if we have that record warm Atlantic, we don’t have El Niño putting somewhat of the brakes on, you know what the heck are we going to see for 2024.
“So when it comes to El Niño, the odds of it going away are very high. This is the forecast that has just come out from the Climate Prediction Centre, and they’ve actually upped the odds now to over 80% of La Nina for August through October.”
“I think certainly, the odds of La Niña are pretty elevated for the upcoming hurricane season,” he said.
Klotzbach added that no matter whether a strong La Niña is coming, the record warm Atlantic waters could be sufficient an influencing factor for an active hurricane season on its own, in his view.
Klotzbach also noted that precipitation anomaly forecasts are showing a chance of more thunderstorm activity to the west Atlantic area, which might suggest more tropical storm activity closer to the United States.
But he also noted that this forecast could also suggest storms may head further west as well, which is perhaps a notable insight for the catastrophe bond, insurance-linked securities (ILS) and reinsurance markets as the track and steering of storms is critical.
He explained, “You can use this as kind of a proxy for tropical cyclones in the tropics and if we look at this you can see the greens are darkest in the western Atlantic. So indicating that we might not necessarily see as much re-curvature as we did last year.
“When La Niña comes in, typically the Bermuda high is a bit stronger, also La Nina tends to favour low-latitude development and storms forming at lower latitudes, the odds of those recurving are a little bit less.”
Klotzbach concluded, “Certainly, at least at this point, I would say systems point towards likely a pretty active hurricane season.”
On what to expect from the seasonal forecasts that are released over the coming weeks, including his own, Klotzbach said, “I suspect, pretty much everyone will be coming out with a pretty aggressive forecast for 2024.”
Track the 2024 Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane season on our dedicated page and we’ll update you as new information emerges.
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