The curtains will close on this year’s hurricane season Monday, Nov. 30, and it appears as though the Wrightsville Beach/Wilmington area will bow out gracefully.
El Niño winds suppressed many of the storms that formed over the Atlantic Ocean, and lower than average sea surface temperatures hampered the development of cyclone activity, said Terry Leebo, tropical program manager with the National Weather Service in Wilmington (NWSW).
Meteorologists at NWSW were unsure of what specifically caused the lower-than-normal ocean temperatures, but many of them believed it to be the result of a natural mix of environmental factors.
Leebo confirmed that so far in 2009, the Atlantic has witnessed nine named storms, three hurricanes and two major hurricanes, slightly less than average.
Activity in the Atlantic usually produces on average 10 named storms, six hurricanes and more than two major hurricanes, Leebo said.
"It wasn’t as active as they thought it was going to be," said lead forecaster Rick Kreiter with the NWSW.
New Hanover County had a stroke of good fortune when it came to hurricanes this year, but that doesn’t mean the Cape Fear region escaped a series of torrential weather events.
Three heavy rainfalls—one record setter—flooded parts of New Hanover and Brunswick counties and led to small, localized evacuations.
The first occurred on July 6, when 6.5 inches of rain soaked the region in three hours. The result was flooding and thus the evacuation of several first-story apartments near the intersection of College Road and Market Street in Wilmington, said Josh Weiss, meteorologist with the NWSW.
Then between Sept. 22-26, remnants of Hurricane Fred created a trough of moisture that oscillated back and forth over the area for days, dropping a tremendous 7.84 inches of rain, making it the wettest non-tropical event on record since 1950, Weiss said.
More recently, weather observers said the county was fortunate it wasn’t drenched by remnants of Tropical Storm Ida, Weiss said.
Even so, Ida created a coastal storm off the Cape Fear area and dumped 4.5 inches of rain and created erosion on the county beaches but by the time it strengthened into a threat it had already moved north, soaking the northeast corner of the state and southern Virginia.
"These events happen," Weiss said. "The right combination of ingredients come together to give us these events sometimes. Record events happen everywhere."
