Today kicks off the official start of the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season. Most people living on the east coast do not look forward to this, but being a surfer from New York, hurricane season is the best time of the year for surf. The weather is beautiful, the water is the warmest and the waves are usually good. Now even though today is the start of the season, the storms that send us the waves don’t start showing until mid August and lasts into September. This part of the season is called the Cape Verde Season. This is because most of the storms during this time of year push off the west coast of Africa and begin to form right around the Cape Verde Islands. Every year the National Hurricane Center posts the list of names of the storms for the season, its fun to go through the list and pick out the names that we think might send us big swells.
So what makes these late season storms so favoriable for us is that they start as tropical waves in the western Atlantic, make their way west, gaining strength, and then begin to head North folllowing the east coast of the US. Due to fronts moving across the U.S., these storms will usually hold for a day or two off the coast of North Carolina and then push back out east/northeast and back into the Atlantic. This sends us direct ground swell with the perfect direction for all of Long Island’s south facing beaches without any of the hurricane weather. Now I can go on all day explaining how swells and waves are created and what conditions are most favorable and why and how weather systems interact, but I will leave that for another day.
A good example of a storm that sent us perfect swell for a solid couple days was Hurricane Fabian of 2003. Click the image below to see the bigger version of Fabian’s track through the Atlantic.
