Late bloomers...

Here we are in August with still hardly any tropical action to speak of... alas, we've got a nice little Cape Verde tropical wave, which stands little chance of becoming anything significant any time soon... we'll just keep an eye on it. Now, I know what you're thinking... last year, by this time, we were watching Tropical Storm Edouard. We had already seen two hurricanes, one (Bertha) reaching category 5 strength, and here we are in August with El Nino breathing down our necks...

Don't let your guard down... I'm sure most of you remember 2004. Yes, that was the year of Charley, Gaston, Ivan and Jeanne (to name a few). In fact, we saw 15 named storms that year after Alex wasn't named until August 1. Incidentally, Alex is the name that replaced a storm name that stands alone in the history books, another late blooming storm, Andrew. Hurricane Andrew formed as a Cape Verde tropical wave on August 14, 1992 (incidentally, an El Nino year). Being named on August 16, Andrew made his way across the Atlantic wreaking havoc in southern Florida...

Andrew was a small and ferocious Cape Verde hurricane that wrought unprecedented economic devastation along a path through the northwestern Bahamas, the southern Florida peninsula, and south-central Louisiana. Damage in the United States is estimated to be near 25 billion, making Andrew the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history.

After preliminarily rating Hurricane Andrew as a category 4 hurricane, the rating of that ferocious and catastrophic storm was upgraded to a category 5, making Andrew one of 3 category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the United States as a category 5 hurricane (the other 2 were the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and Hurricane Camille in 1969.) Incidentally, only his two sister category 5 storms rated a greater intensity at landfall.

Incidentally, here is a list of late bloomers...

August 12, 1950 - Able
August 27, 1962 - Alma
August 2, 1963 - Arlene
August 30, 1967 - Arlene
August 13, 1974 - Alma
August 30, 1977 - Anita
August 2, 1980 - Allen
August 15, 1983 - Alicia
August 29, 1984 - Arthur (there was a subtropical storm in mid-August)
August 9, 1987 - TS #1
August 7, 1988 - Alberto
August 17, 1992 - Andrew (there was a subtropical storm in April; we had a TD in May)
August 4, 2000 - Alberto
August 1, 2004 - Alex (We know what happened after that...)

That's some late bloomer hurricane history for you. Hope you enjoyed it.

Have a great day!
~Dewdrop