I figured it would be a good idea to have a thread devoted just to this year's hurricane season in the Atlantic. As if the world isn't already chaotic enough, meteorologists have been forecasting since March that this season will be more active than normal, and some of you have had visions of devastating hurricanes striking the US this year.
Well, there have already been an unprecedented 2 named tropical storms in the month of May (the season doesn't official start until June 1), and right now tropical storm Cristobal (the earliest forming 3rd named storm in recorded Atlantic history) is beginning to move north from southeastern Mexico and is expected to make landfall in Louisiana by Sunday. Cristobal has dumped 24 inches of rain on parts of the Yucatan Peninsula. Even if it makes landfall in the US as just a tropical storm, I feel like it may drop massive amounts of rain and cause catastrophic flooding (like Harvey and Florence did). Thoughts? I know this isn't very optimistic, but I can't ignore the foreboding I felt when the red circle of Cristobal showed up on the National Hurricane Center map at the beginning of the week. The warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico also have a known recent history of rapidly strengthening tropical systems (think Hurricane Michael in 2018).
UPDATE: The National Weather Service has now issued tropical storm warnings for southeastern Louisiana, coastal Alabama, coastal Mississippi, and the far western portion of the Florida Panhandle. Storm surge watches have also been issued as far east as Hernando County (just north of Tampa). For a storm that's still 2 days away from landfall, this flurry of warnings is concerning. Cristobal is turning out to be big enough that the US Gulf coast can begin to experience the outer bands of the storm tonight.
This hurricane season continues to break records. Tropical Storm Fay, which just made landfall in New Jersey, is the earliest forming "F" storm since modern record keeping began. Fay is bringing heavy rainfall to the mid-Atlantic, and there will be some flooding in urban and poor drainage areas, but that's not what really concerns me (especially since this storm is moving north at a steady clip). Rather, I'm concerned about what Fay portends. The really powerful hurricanes usually don't start forming until mid-August at the earliest.
@coyote I am also concerned about these hurricanes and this season. When I heard about Fay yesterday morning, I had a vision of first floor apartments flooding in parts of NYC and some people needing to escape to higher floors to protect themselves.
I hope people will take this hurricane season seriously. Climate change is exponential, not linear. It's accelerating, not growing steadily. I know you know this but others may not realize what exponential means. This kind of growth means that we will increasingly see record-breaking storms and some will be extreme.
We may see steep jumps in the size and virulence of storms. We don't know how quickly weather changes are accelerating or how steep the curve is. But I would get out of the way of any approaching storms from here on in.
I didn't learn about Fay until today. Last night, however, I had a premonitory dream. When I was growing up, my extended family used to rent a house in the NC Outer Banks for a week every summer. In my dream, I was in an oceanfront Outer Banks beach house with some of my brothers and cousins. We were on the third (topmost) floor of the house, which is usually where the kitchen, family room, and large windows are placed in these sorts of houses. I looked out a window and saw dark clouds with aprons of rain beneath them approaching. When the storm arrived, the ocean waves grew bigger and bigger, to the point where I realized they would swamp the beach and inflict structural damage on the neighborhood. Rather than being alarmed, I was fascinated; I was thinking "How interesting. It's just like a movie." But then the water from the waves surged into the house, covered the first two floors, and came up to my knees; I had to grab hold of the walls to keep from being pulled outside. I then realized in a panic that my brother was on the floor below and had likely been carried away by the water. To my relief, when the water subsided, my brother trudged upstairs.
The dream did seem to be about not taking these weather threats seriously and ending up in a dangerous situation as a result.
Tropical Storm Hanna is churning towards Texas, and Tropical Storm Gonzalo is on track to impact the southern Windward Islands. They aren't expected to strengthen.
These are the earliest-formed "G" and "H" storms on record. It's foreboding that the previous holders of all of these "earliest formed" records were storms in the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season. I started this thread because I felt the current hurricane season would be one for the records, and so far that intuition is coming true. I think things are going to get more violent next month, and everyone on the eastern seaboard of the US needs to be prepared. COVID-19 and the political situation are not the only manifestations of this chaotic year.
Thanks, @coyote, for starting this thread. Your last post says a lot of the things i was going to say in a post that got eaten yesterday. Houston started getting rain from Hannah earlier this evening, even though it is projected to hit Corpus Christie- which is a couple hundred miles away. But rain is always good in TX in the summer (unless you get so much that it starts coming up thru the floorboards into the house).
When i was a kid on the coast, i looked forward to tropical storms, because "Hey! Surf's up!" lol. But this whole summer has felt like "Hurricane Weather", something i can't describe.
I threw cards on Gonzalo (which means ''battle'' in Spanish, aye yai yai) and it's impact on the Gulf and East coasts. For the Gulf, it was Knight of Pentacles. But for Gonzalo's impact on the East Coast, i drew the Emperor, reversed. That didn't sound good, so i drew another card for clarification. It was the Death card. I know that the Death card doesn't have to mean actual death- it could mean transformation. But transformation by hurricane is always traumatic. At least it wasn't the Tower card.
Not trying to scare anyone. We just have to watch, and be prepared. Please feel free to throw cards for yourselves. I hope to be wrong.
I was going to list all of the names for the hurricane season of 2020 here, to make it easy to do readings on all of them with the Tarot, but i think that is what got my post deleted last time, so i won't.
@unk-p that's interesting what you got for the east coast. I haven't really been paying attention to Gonzalo since it was so far south. I'm in the Wilmington NC area, this will be my second hurricane season (I'm originally from AZ), so all of this is still new to me. I've thrown a few cards in the past few months on hurricane season, but it was nothing significant at the time. I think I'll do this again to see what I get.
Here's the list, let's see if it works, haha.
List of active/remaining 2020 Atlantic hurricane names:
Gonzalo
Hanna
Isaias
Josephine
Kyle
Laura
Marco
Nana
Omar
Paulette
Rene
Sally
Teddy
Vicky
Wilfred