Recently I blogged about my fears about this upcoming hurricane season. I'm not the only one.

Reuters recently reported that many experts are worried. Fellow storm bloggers Jeff Masters and Eric Berger are worried. Heck, everybody is worried.

Berger points out that if we look at a quantity called ACE--or, "accumulated cyclone energy," which is basically a combined measure of hurricane numbers, strength, and duration-there are only three years in the historical record that had shown more activity than this one in June and/or July. They are 2005, 1933, and 1916. And here's where it gets interesting: 2005 was the worst year ever, with 28 storms, and 1933 was the second worst, with 21.

Not good company to be in.

[Storm Tracks of the 1933 Atlantic hurricane season. Note all the smackage of the U.S. coastline.]

Granted, hurricane seasons are tricky things. They love to defy expectations. For example, the U.S. took a very serious battering during the Atlantic hurricane season of 2004, when four powerful storms rammed Florida. But four years ago in July of 2004, you wouldn't have been able to see that coming. The very first storm of that year, Alex, didn't even form until July 31^st.

Or consider the 2006 hurricane season: It had a notably quiet August, a very active September, and an almost completely dead October. The atmosphere is a complicated place.

Still, I'm expecting that when the next round of seasonal hurricane forecasts comes out-the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's prediction for the rest of the year is due in early August, and another prediction from Colorado State University can be expected to come out August 5-they'll be quite bullish in terms of what they foresee for the rest of the season.

Meanwhile, southern Texas must be reeling right now from our fourth storm of the year, Dolly, which hit (the experts say) as a strong Category 1 or weak Category 2. Either way, it was the strongest storm to hit the United States since Hurricane Wilma shook Florida as a Category 3 monster in October of 2005.

Speaking of which...there's another of those historical analogue years.

This isn't normal.

It's getting into the final part of July, and already we've had four named storms in the Atlantic region--and good reason to expect that we may see a fifth before August. Moreover, the types of storms we're seeing are also troubling.

Warming in the Gulf of Mexico, July 20, 2008

In particular, the finally dissipated Hurricane Bertha set all manner of records, most of them associated with longevity and strength so early in the season. That includes becoming the longest lived Atlantic hurricane ever recorded in July, and the third strongest ever recorded in that month (and sixth strongest overall among pre-August hurricanes).

And now we're looking at a likely Hurricane Dolly, which will get the chance to churn over the extremely warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall somewhere (presumably) along the Mexico or Texas Gulf coast.

Meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center has just begun to track a strong tropical wave--much like the precursor to Bertha--that is emerging off of the African Coast. The strongest Atlantic hurricanes, dubbed Cape Verde-type storms, generally form from such waves--and generally do so later in the season. But that's not the case in 2008.

Granted, this year isn't starting off quite as busily as 2005--which featured no less than six named storms by the end of July. Still, it could be very close.

From the start, there was something pretty odd about Hurricane Bertha.

The storm formed just before Independence Day last week, and immediately showed plenty of it. Bertha developed from a tropical wave almost immediately as the disturbance came off the coast of Africa, and so became the most easterly forming July tropical storm known to us, as well as the most easterly forming Atlantic tropical storm period.

In this, Bertha was aided along by warmer than average ocean temperatures, which could sustain the storm's development so early in the season. As hurricane expert Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it to me by email, Bertha was "one for the record books" -- and the storm was just getting going.

NOAA

As Bertha moved steadily westward, she intensified, first becoming a hurricane and then exploding into a powerful Category 3 major hurricane Monday with 120 mile per hour winds—and possibly, for a brief while, a Category 4. It's the earliest we've seen such an intense Atlantic hurricane since ...

We all remember (I hope) November's Cyclone Sidr, the deadliest global hurricane in a decade, which killed more than 3,000 people after making a powerful landfall in Bangladesh. After that, you would think this vulnerable region would get a break – but Cyclone Nargis may have other ideas. ...

Okay, so: Yesterday I gave a good, long, hard read to this paper, just published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by MIT hurricane guru Kerry Emanuel and some colleagues. It was incumbent upon me to do so for two reasons: 1. Emanuel is one of the main personages in my book Storm World, which chronicles much of the hoopla that occurred after he and another team of scientists published twin 2005 papers suggesting that global warming had markedly increased the intensity of the average hurricane; 2. this latest paper has inspired press reports suggesting that Emanuel is now changing his tune, backing away from his previous conclusions. ...

Consider: Over water, Erin was never anything but a weak and disorganized tropical storm, one that struck the Texas coast on August 16 with maximum sustained winds of 30 knots (tropical depression class).

But then something beyond crazy happened. ...

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