The 2010 West Coast Tropical Season REALLY sucked (but the East Coast rocked)

The West Coast’s tropical season sucked. No two words about it…we had almost no tropical activity thanks the shift back to the ENSO/La Nina flow.

If that wasn’t painful enough on its own at the same time we were wallowing through knee high Southern Hemi leftovers for weeks at a time, the East Coast saw Hurricane after Hurricane practically put on a parade of tropical swells, lighting up spots from Florida on up through Nova Scotia.

Image Credit NOAA

Well NOAA released a document a couple of weeks ago that twists the knife just a bit more. You can read the article here…

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20101129_hurricaneseason.html

…but it basically boils down to this.

1. The Pacific saw the worst tropical season (no kidding the absolute worst)…with the fewest named storms and hurricanes since the beginning of the Satellite Era when NOAA, NHC, and NWS have been recording this sort of data.

2. The East Coast had one of the most active seasons on record (which goes back to the late 1800’s)…but was considered more of a Gentle Giant…with lots of storms and hurricanes but very few of them making landfall, or causing catastrophic damage like we have seen in the past. From a surf standpoint it sounds almost like a perfect season…lots of swell, but without the weather that usually screws it up.

Now one of the coolest things that NOAA did in the article…they took the GOES satellite images from June 1 through Nov 30 and put them in a fast time-lapse movie. You can’t see the EPAC all that well but it is still pretty sweet to watch a full hurricane season in action.

Image Credit NOAA

Now we just need to have something similar happen in the Eastern Pacific.