User blog:CobraStrike/Cobra Strike's Official Season Prediction for the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Seasons (June 1)

Hello and welcome to my official prediction for this year's (2012) Atlantic hurricane season. This is where I make my statements on the factors leading to my final prediction. Once I make these predictions, we'll have to wait until the end of the season to find out if my predictions were close enough.

Current El Nino/La Nina Anomalies
2012 began on the heels of a strong 2 year La Nina that produced the two seasons that both went into the record books as the third most active Atlantic hurricane seasons by producing 19 named storms each. The Oceanic Nino Index (ONI) peaked at -1.5 towards the end of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season. However, since then the ONI has been increasing, which would mean that the waters in the Pacific are heating up. As a result, the La Nina episode officially ended on May 3, 2012, in a diagnostic discussion issued by theClimate Prediction Center. As such the end of La Nina marked the return of ENSO-Neutral. The general consensus from this year's SST anomaly forecast models predict that the SSTs in the Atlantic and Pacific will remain in ENSO-Neutral throughout the hurricane season, leaning towards El Nino. I predict that this year should remain, as the models say, ENSO-Neutral but leaning towards warmer SSTs in the Pacific.

Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential
Currently most of the TCHP at the start of the season is centered around the Western and Central portions of the Caribbean Sea, which is normal for this time of year, and the maximum TCHP is at around 90-100. While TCHP values are lower than they were last year at the start of the season, they are higher and cover a larger area than in 2009 , which was a strong El Nino and one this year's Colorado State University forecast's analogous years.

TO BE CONTINUED