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Hurricane Season Is About To Begin, And Forecasters Expect It To Be Busy

Areas along the Texas coast are still recovering from Hurricane Harvey.
Gabriel C. Pérez
/
KUT
Areas along the Texas coast are still recovering from Hurricane Harvey.

Residents of Texas and Puerto Rico are still recovering from the last hurricane season, as the next season is set to start. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration predicts 2018 is going to be an active one.

“My team and I at NOAA are predicting a 75 percent chance that the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season will either be near normal or above normal," said Gerry Bell, the agency's lead seasonal hurricane forecaster.

Bell said it’s not just people along the coast who are susceptible to the deadliest threat from hurricanes – flooding.

“More than 80 million people in the United States live in areas that could be impacted by a hurricane," he said. "Only a fraction of these people live along the immediate coast."

A near the Yucatan Peninsula is expected to move north into the Gulf of Mexico in the next few days. The National Hurricane Center gives it a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours and a 90 percent chance in the next five days. If it does form, it’s expected to track north, making landfall east of Texas, putting the state on the dry side of the system.

The season officially starts June 1 and runs through November.  

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Austin resident, on and off, mostly on, since 1986. Covering news of Central Texas and beyond since 1994. Father since 2010. Maker of sounds, informational and otherwise, since longer ago than any of the above.