When it was over, not a single storm had made landfall in the United States. We're getting better all the time. Weather experts expect some new methods to produce vast improvements this year in tracking hurricanes and predicting their intensity. NASA jets will be dropping measuring devices into storms from above, and flying robotic drones could be measuring hurricanes from below. Last year, there were 15 named storms and eight hurricanes, three of them intense.
Researchers now believe warm ocean temperatures feed hurricanes.
But as hurricanes spin in place, they cool the waters below them and become weaker. Isaac Ginis, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, pioneered the line of study and said the coupled model should improve intensity predictions by 30 percent. Another important change this year is in the weather service's global analyses. Four times a day, the agency takes information from satellites, weather balloons and other sources, and creates a snapshot of the world's atmosphere. The weather service got approval this month on changes that should help computers use that data to better simulate hurricanes moving across the ocean's surface.