If you live on the Gulf Coast or Eastern Seaboard, hopefully you’re ready for Atlantic hurricane season, which started on Sunday, June 1. As the season gets underway, hurricane-friendly ocean temperatures in the Atlantic are ramping up, though they’re not quite there in all places just yet.
A new graphic from NASA’s Earth Observatory shows ocean temperatures at the end of May for the entire globe. For tropical cyclones, the broader label for hurricanes and tropical storms, to form, surface ocean waters generally need to be above 82°F, which is colored in red on the map below.
That helps fuel the evaporation that drives a hurricane’s convection engine and give storms a boost from a regular ol’ rainstorm into a full-fledged tropical cyclone. Temperatures below that threshold are shown in blue.
Large portions of the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific were above that threshold at the end of May, which reflects the fact that cyclone season never really ends in those areas.
However, the Atlantic is a different story. Hurricane-ready waters spread across the Caribbean to areas to the west of Africa. There’s still a fairly large area of cooler water stretching from the northwest coast of Africa across the Atlantic.
http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/heat-worlds-oceans-are-heating-hurricane-season-20140605
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