If you could look down at the Pacific Ocean right now, you’d see three hurricanes spinning in a row, between 15 and 20 degrees north. Furthest east is Polo, an unusually strong hurricane that has been churning off the southern coast of Mexico for nearly a week. To its west, Odalys, once a Category 4 hurricane, is slowly weakening in the open ocean. In the central Pacific, Hurricane Nolo has reached Category 2 status and has crept about 145 miles off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, where it’s expected to bring up to 25 inches of rain, potentially causing flooding and landslides. The ocean is a mess of hurricanes, and it’s not the first time this season.
Just last month, four storms formed across the Pacific over a 12-day period. Two of them, Hurricane Lala and Tropical Storm Moke, came dangerously close to Hawaii. Driven by an exceptional El Niño event, tropical storms have increased in frequency compared with an average year. Typically, at this point in the season, 12 tropical storms would have formed in the eastern Pacific, Michael Brennan, the director of the National Hurricane Center, told me. This year, there have already been 17.
Of the storms in the Pacific now, Polo, which has wobbled between Category 4 and 5, is the monster, and it will likely bring catastrophic damage when it makes landfall on Monday. The warm water temperatures associated with El Niño increase the likelihood of stronger storms, and this year’s event is shaping up to be one of the most dramatic on record. “El Niño is the ‘great nudger’ of weather systems around the planet,” Michelle L’Heureux, who leads the El Niño–Southern Oscillation team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, wrote in an email. “Very strong El Niños are often able to nudge more.”
Warmer waters also mean that the area where a storm can form expands. Storms tend to show up in the region where Polo is lingering, Brennan said, and generally, by the time they reach the central part of the ocean, near Hawaii, they weaken. But this year, waters in the central Pacific are more than 3 degrees Celsius warmer than usual, allowing hurricanes such as Nolo to form south of the islands and much closer to them. When I asked Brennan how abnormal this was—I’d seen others calling this a historic hurricane season—he said that a season like this comes around every decade or so. Still, it’s a big one.
Nolo is only the latest in a string of disasters that the island of Hawaii has endured this year. In January, the Kilauea volcano erupted for eight hours, and blanketed communities on the island with rocks and ash. Then, back-to-back Kona lows, a type of seasonal cyclone, brought historic flooding in March. Two months later, a 6.0-magnitude earthquake shook the island and damaged nearly 150 homes. In mid-August, Hurricane Lala, a Category 1 storm, dumped some 30 inches of rain on parts of the Big Island without making landfall.
David Ho, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was at home in Honolulu when Lala hit. His neighborhood flooded, and he was one of 200,000 electricity customers across the state who lost power. More than 200 homes and an estimated $67 million worth of public infrastructure was damaged, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. “We have a lot of houses that were built before the building codes were modernized,” Ho told me. “So once in a while, you have roofs that just fly away.”
Weeks later, many people, especially those in rural areas with limited access to groceries, are still feeling Lala’s lingering effects. “We always talk about the importance of being prepared, and you want to have three weeks of food supply and everything,” Janice Ikeda, the CEO of the nonprofit Vibrant Hawaii, told me. “Well, we don’t have that anymore, because it got wiped out.” (The state reissued Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to more than 65,000 households after the storm.) The damage and losses the island suffered from Lala only make lives and infrastructure more vulnerable in the face of Nolo.
For even one storm to skirt that close to Hawaii would have been an event: The Pacific Ocean is big enough, and the Hawaiian islands are small enough, that most hurricanes roll by at a much greater distance. But earlier this month, another storm, Lowell, approached the western part of the state, near Kauai and Niihau, pushing hurricane-strength winds and waves ashore. More than 90 percent of utility customers in Kauai lost power.
Nolo likely won’t be a repeat of Lala or Lowell, because it is farther out and should remain 100 miles from the coast, Brennan said. Even so, the island could see more than two feet of rain, coastal flooding, and high surf. The hurricane season doesn’t end for another two months, and the effect of El Niño is likely to only get stronger, according to NOAA’s current predictions. Before the year is through, the “great nudger” will likely hurl more hurricanes Hawaii’s way.
In the Atlantic, the nudge is working in the opposite direction: El Niño generates strong wind shears, which make it hard for hurricanes to form. September should mark the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, Allison Wing, an associate professor of atmospheric science at Florida State University, told me. Nearly four months into hurricane season, no hurricanes have appeared, and none are on the horizon.