Although the Atlantic hurricane season officially ended ten days ago, the tropical atmosphere still has a little kick in it yet. A potent yet asymmetric 1010mb Low is presently located just a couple degrees east of Puerto Rico. It is in weak southwesterly wind shear, and has a window of opportunity of about 24-36 hours to organize before shear increases. It's over 27.5C water and should remain over that for the next few days as it heads WNW at 10kts. If this gets named, it would become Olga, the 15th named storm of the season.
You can track the precipitation around this disturbance from the San Juan long-range radar: http://einstein.atmos.colostate.edu/~mcnoldy/tropics/olga07/Olga_10Dec07.gif
If you recall, the season started off on May 9 with Andrea... three weeks before the official beginning of Atlantic hurricane season. Should Olga form in December, we'd really have a long tropical season!
Up through this potential storm, and using the currently available "best track" data from NHC (not all storms have been reanalyzed post-season yet), we had 14 tropical storms, 6 of which became hurricanes, and 2 of those became major hurricanes. Combining these numbers and their respective longevities allows us to compare the season to a "normal" season (net tropical cyclone activity = NTC). In this comparison, 2007 was 95.1% of normal, or about as average as it gets! If the current disturbance gets named, let's suppose for a day, that percentage goes up to 97.2. Furthermore, neither Dean nor Felix have final reports completed yet, and any change in the major hurricanes could change the NTC a bit.
Please visit my tropical Atlantic headquarters.
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