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You might not expect to find one of the world’s top hurricane scientists in a landlocked state nearly a thousand miles away from the ocean, but if you knew as much about these natural disasters as Phil Klotzbach does, you’d probably move as far away from them as possible, too.
For the past 25 years, Klotzbach has been studying Atlantic basin hurricanes with Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science. There, he researches tropical weather patterns to issue yearly hurricane forecasts, a practice that CSU has done since 1984. Here’s some cred for the meteorologist: In April of this year, he predicted, “We anticipate a well above-average probability for major hurricanes making landfall along the continental United States coastline and in the Caribbean.” Hurricane Milton is the fifth hurricane to make landfall this year, which is tied for the second most on record.
We caught up with Klotzbach to understand what’s driving this year’s active season.
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
5280: How did a hurricane expert find himself in Colorado?
Klotzbach: I was born and raised in Massachusetts, which had its hurricanes—Gloria in 1985 and Bob in 1991. That got me interested in studying hurricanes since I was a little kid. I came out to start graduate school at CSU in 2000 and studied under Dr. Bill Gray, who really pioneered seasonal hurricane predictions. I was co-author of those seasonal forecasts with Dr. Gray and some others until 2005 and became lead author in 2006.
What does authoring a forecast mean?
I helped build some of the models that we use, and I make seasonal forecasts each year. Since 2006, I’ve spearheaded the model development, analyzed data, and written up the actual text in the forecast. We put out our first forecast in April and update it in June, July, and August.
Hurricane season in the Atlantic starts on June 1, and it doesn’t normally ramp up until August, so most of your activity is from August to October. There are a lot of discussions between us and agencies like NOAA. The most important thing we do every year is called a verification, which is a document where we go over our forecasts, how accurate they were, and lessons learned to better model them in the future. It’ll probably be a really long document this year because of how crazy the season is.
So this hurricane season is unusual?
Yes. Hurricane season usually gets really busy around the middle of August, and then it dies down by early October. This year, we started off strong with Beryl, but when the season typically ramps up in August, it just went dead. There was very little activity in August and September. But it’s completely turned around since, with five hurricanes since Helene.
What about the strength of Helene and Milton? Is it normal to have multiple major hurricanes in a year?
It’s not unusual to have strong hurricanes during a busy season. One of the busiest years we’ve had recently was 2005, which brought us four Category 5 hurricanes, which is absolutely nuts. That was the year we had Katrina, which everyone remembers. This year we’ve had two, which is a lot. But once you start getting more than two, that’s when it starts to get unprecedented. It’s definitely been a busy year for landfall hurricanes: Milton is our fifth hurricane to make landfall this year, which is tied for the second most on record.
Why is this year’s hurricane season so atypical?
When you look at landfall in Florida, it’s extremely streaky. Florida got hit with a lot of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, but then we went 10 years without any hurricanes hitting the state. Since then it’s been busy again. So seeing clusters of storms isn’t unusual. I could spend three hours talking about climate change and hurricanes, but with warmer oceans, you don’t necessarily expect to see more storms, but stronger ones. Milton, for example, went from being named as a small tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in just two days. Those kinds of events are likely to get more common.
Stay up to date with Phil Klotzbach’s hurricane forecasts—including information on Milton—through his X account @philklotzbach.
