Hundreds of people gas up every week at the Get N Go on U.S. 13 in Windsor, unaware of what might be happening under their feet. The convenience store and gas station is owned by Zero Investments, which was fined more than $14,000 last year for violating seven state environmental laws, including failing to investigate suspected releases from its network of underground tanks and pipes that store and move gasoline.

The Get N Go is one of seven gas stations in coastal counties that were penalized in 2015 by state environmental regulators for failing to properly maintain or operate their underground storage tanks, or USTs. Petroleum spills can contaminate groundwater, harm the coast’s sensitive aquifers and for residents on private wells, taint their drinking water for decades.

New spills, coupled with a backlog of more than 5,000 release sites, present an intractable financial situation for the state. While the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality estimates it needs at least $800 million to help clean up the backlog of releases, only $30 million is available a year for the Commercial Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund.

While North Carolina has more commercial USTs than most states, ranking ninth in the nation in tanks per person, it receives substantially less revenue for its program, roughly one-third of the national average.

The shortfall is the largely the result of cuts by the state legislature to the UST fund, which helps those responsible for petroleum spills clean them up. Last year, lawmakers cut the budget for the UST fund by $600,000, according to Robin Smith, a former assistant secretary for the Department of Environment Quality who now writes an environmental policy blog. And instead of an annual appropriation from the state’s Highway Fund, which would have stabilized the UST program’s revenue, Smith wrote, lawmakers eliminated that source of money, worth $13.3 million, in 2015.

Instead, lawmakers implemented one-time funding and tacked on a legislative review to determine whether the trust fund should be continued. But at current funding levels — primarily from state motor excise taxes, tank operating fees and small federal grants — a DEQ analysis concluded, it would take until 2046 to clean up the old sites, some of which are already more than 20 years old.

More than 720 of the overdue sites are in DEQ’s Wilmington and Washington regions, which encompass 28 counties in the coastal plain.

To begin whittling away at the backlog with such little money, DEQ last month began changing the focus of its clean ups, based on risk assessments at each site. The bulk of the money will go toward remediating, or at the very least stabilizing, the 1,761 highest-risk sites — those close to drinking water wells, wetlands, rivers and even city water utilities. There are 312 such sites in the Wilmington and Washington DEQ regions.

The lower-risk locations — those the agency deems unlikely to harm human health or the environment — will receive less UST fund money, about $500,000 per year. Instead, DEQ will monitor those discharges and rely on “natural attenuation” — in other words, time — for the contamination to subside.

“It would be ideal if funding was not an issue and the decision could be based on the best available technology” to clean up the sites,” reads the DEQ’s new policy, released on June 1. “However, it is certainly not very realistic.”

Aware of the financial burden on states, the EPA approves of the use of risk-based standards in cleaning up UST sites. North Carolina has followed suit, says Art Barnhardt, DEQ’s Underground Storage Tank section chief, “as a tool to control the costs.”

At 792 sites, the risk to human health and the environment is unknown. Half of the sites, classified as low- or intermediate-risk, are subject to less stringent groundwater standards. Known as Gross Contaminant Levels, they allow concentrations of certain chemicals and compounds to be 1,000 times greater than the state 2L standards. 2L is named for the section of state administrative code that regulates groundwater standards.

For example, hexane, a chemical commonly extracted from crude oil and petroleum, can damage the stomach and lungs, if swallowed. Under 2L standards, groundwater can contain no more than 400 parts per billion of hexane; that’s equivalent to 400 drops of water in a 10,000-gallon swimming pool. Under Gross Contaminant Levels, 400,000 drops of water would be permissible in the same pool.

The 2L standard applies to a minority of sites based on risk, says Barnhardt, and freeing up dollars would allow regulators to scrutinize and more quickly remediate them.

Scientists have discovered that petroleum spills go through phases. Initially, the plume expands in groundwater. Depending on the area’s geology, the plume can travel through fractures in underground rock or migrate via porous soil. At this point, it’s important to contain and clean up as much of the contamination as possible. But later, between five and seven years, Barnhardt says, the plume can begin to stabilize. And eventually it can contract.

However, state regulators still don’t know which phase — expanding, stable or contracting — each of the 5,000 sites is in. Barnhardt says the UST division has only recently begun using monitoring and site data to divine that information through computer modeling. “We don’t know the numbers yet,” he says.

Contamination from leaking USTs is common. Since the state legislature established the UST fund in 1985, there have been more than 19,000 reported discharges, both commercial and residential, into groundwater and soil throughout North Carolina, according to DEQ records. Many commercial discharges happen at some of the state’s 9,000 gas stations. Non-commercial spills often occur as the result of leaks in residential heating oil tanks.

The UST Fund helps business owners remediate the damage from those releases. Since the fund’s inception, the state has spent more than $600 million on cleanups. Under current regulations, the businesses — “responsible parties” — must pay a deductible of $20,000 to $75,000 before tapping the fund. They also have to pay an annual fee of $420 per tank and carry at least $120,000 in insurance. “We need that level of financial assurance,” Barnhardt says.

In North Carolina’s coastal plain counties, there are 301 UST Fund sites, worth a state investment of $5.4 million since 2011, according to DEQ records.

As early as 2004, federal environmental officials expressed concern about the solvency of the Commercial UST Trust Fund. A 2007 Government Accountability Office report concluded there was not enough money in the fund to address all of the state’s high-risk sites. And in 2009, North Carolina ranked in the top 10 states in the number of backlogged sites, according to EPA documents.

The financial situation, and thus the backlog, has not improved under the Republican-led state legislature. “There just isn’t enough funding,” says Katie Hicks, associate director of Clean Water for North Carolina. “That’s the core of the problem.”

The state’s new budget, passed last week, appropriates money to the UST fund based primarily on a small portion of revenues from the motor fuels excise tax, in addition to tank permit fees. However, it’s unclear how much money that would generate, since lawmakers voted last year to decrease that excise tax rate by one cent.

And none of this funding includes a state-lead program that adopts commercial sites whose owners have gone bankrupt, can’t meet the deductible or can’t be located. There are 1,200 of those sites statewide, with only $3.5 million available to fund the cleanups. “We can’t go in as aggressively,” Barnhardt says. “If it’s a high-risk site, we do what we can to stabilize it.”

The future of the UST program is precarious. Last year, the state legislature eliminated the Noncommercial UST Trust Fund, which covered the cleanup costs for property owners. The program ends in December. Property owners will now bear the entire cost of clean up, which could become complicated when land is bought and sold.

And the state could get out of the Commercial UST Trust Fund business altogether. In a January 2016 presentation from DEQ to legislators, the agency noted that the General Assembly should consider continuing a source of revenue for the fund “during transition to privatization.”

Without the UST fund, companies would have to buy private environmental insurance and finance a clean up themselves. And if they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — the state could be required to intervene to comply with federal environmental law. With what money, though, is uncertain.

To Learn More

• N.C.: Underground storage tanks
• EPA: Underground storage tanks
• 2009 General Assembly report

RALEIGH — Concrete and asphalt plants, lumber companies and landfills are among the more than 1,000 polluters that, under proposed rules, soon could pump pollutants into the air with little, if any, state oversight. Eighty-six are in coastal counties.

The new rules would allow plants that emit less than 10 tons of air pollutants a year to operate without a permit. Plants that aren’t exempt but emit less than 25 tons of pollutants a year would register with the state Division of Air Quality but wouldn’t need a permit. Previously, the threshold was five tons of any single pollutant.

Division officials note that these small polluters account for 63 percent of the air permit but less than 4 percent of the emissions. While the emissions from each individual plant are small, the cumulative effects, opponents of the rule say, could hurt public health, especially in low-income communities.

The pollutants include nitrogen oxide, which contributes to ground-level ozone pollution; sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain; particulate matter; volatile organic compounds, such as benzene and toluene; and hazardous chemicals such as mercury, chlorine and asbestos.

The N.C. Environmental Management Commission, or EMC, the state’s major environmental rule-making body, will likely approve rules when it meets Thursday.

This rule change will likely occur despite opposition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which cited several concerns about the amendments. During the public-comment period on the proposal, 1,601 people and groups objected to the change. Five were in favor of it. The EMC’s hearing officer, who took comment during the public hearing late last year, recommend approving the rule change despite the opposition.

Eight of the state’s main environmental groups wrote a letter to the division in opposing the shift on several grounds: A lack of oversight and a compliance plan for the facilities, cumulative effects on the public health of even smaller amounts of pollutants and potential cuts to the division staff.

“The biggest thing is we’re exempting another segment of the industry that had been required to get air permits,” says Dave Rogers, state director of Environment North Carolina.

The EMC and division have used administrative costs and paperwork to justify giving lower-emitting facilities a pass. Environmental groups, though, view the changes as yet another rollback of rules and laws that have protected the state’s air.

“Our air is cleaner,” Rogers says. “It’s because of oversight and pollution controls.”

For example, the division announced in July that for first time since 1997, North Carolina met federal attainment goals for all pollutants in all areas across the state. The reductions in Charlotte, in particular, marked a “substantial accomplishment for state and local governments, resulting from years of steady improvements in air quality,” Sheila Holman, director of the N.C. Division of Air Quality, said in a press release.

It’s not one facility’s emissions that can harm the public health, but the aggregate amount, especially in counties and zip codes where these industries are clustered. These environmental justice issues are particularly acute in low-wealth counties, an opponent says.

“This could have a disproportionate impact on communities where the facilities are,” says Jamie Cole, a policy advocate with the N.C. Conservation Network. “Just because the facilities are polluting at a legal level doesn’t mean there are no public health impacts.”

For example, Montgomery County, with a population of just 27,395 people, is saddled with 15 facilities. In contrast, Cumberland County, with more than 326,000 residents, also has 15.

Of the 20 counties with the largest number of exempted facilities per capita, 17 of them have poverty levels of at or above the state median. In Montgomery County, more than a quarter of residents lived below the poverty level, according to 2014 census data, well above the state median of 17.5 percent.

All but one of the top 20 counties reported median household incomes below state levels.

Environmental and health experts are also worried about how a lack of oversight will affect areas with high rates of asthma.

Wilson, Richmond and Jones counties, which have high rates of proposed exempt facilities per capita, also recorded high rates of asthma as compared to the rest of North Carolina. According to state and federal data, asthma sent people to the emergency department more often in counties in the central coast, northeast, southern and western North Carolina. Together, these areas account for nearly 10 percent of all the proposed exempted facilities.

“These smaller sources can be in neighborhoods, not industrial parks,” says Therese Vick, a community organizer with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League.

The EPA also questioned how the state would track exempt facilities. Since there would be little, if any paper trail, state regulators would not know when these facilities changed ownership or management or installed new equipment that could affect emissions levels.

Since the companies would no longer be required to apply for a permit, they could opt not to internally monitor emissions. “Most companies trying to prioritize their environmental expenditures will stop monitoring as frequently or at all,” the environmental groups’ letter read. “What isn’t measured can’t be managed.”

The division and the EMC have responded that the state inspectors could still visit sites. However, it’s unclear how many inspectors would remain to do that job. While the state would lose $280,000 annually in permit fees, the fiscal note reports that the net savings from the relaxed rules would total $553,000 in 2017, and $657,100 annually through 2024.

“Staff time that was used for permitting activities now can be used for other activities,” the note says.

However, that translates to less oversight and potentially a reduction in staff. The cuts, Rogers says, “hurt the DAQ’s ability to monitor the air.”

The proposed rule also allows the DAQ director to decide if facilities are non-compliant, and then can be placed into a permitting process. But as of yesterday, neither the division nor the EMC has issued written compliance assurance plan—which is legally required to be included in a fiscal note— although it’s reportedly been in the works since last summer.

So it’s unclear how the division will discover that a facility is not complying with emission laws, other than site visits, the schedule of which has not been laid out.

“DAQ is relying on an unwritten compliance assurance plan to ensure currently permitted facilities maintain their exempt status,” the environmental groups’ letter read.

“The rule takes a lot of tools away from division staff,” Vick says. “It’s flabbergasting.”

If the EMC passes the amendment on Wednesday, the proposal will go the House Rules Calendar and Operations Committee in the short session that begins in April.

Learn More

• Exempted coastal plants
• EMC hearing officer’s report

There it is, hanging out in the northern Atlantic Ocean, off the southern tip of Greenland, a patch of unusually cold, fresh water in an otherwise warming, salty sea. It’s described, inelegantly, as the big, blue blob because of its color on maps of sea temperatures.

Scientists who are studying the mechanisms behind this cooling phenomenon, suggest that ocean circulation — what they call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — in this part of the world is slowing down. And if you think of the ocean as a living organism, like a human, when circulation decreases in one part, it affects the entire system. This slowing and cooling, which some scientists say is happening decades ahead of schedule, could affect sea level rise on the East Coast, and climate patterns and marine life worldwide.

In St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, at 47 degrees latitude north, professors Brad deYoung and Entcho Demirov live at the southern edge of change. “The North Atlantic is an area that is very dynamic,” says Demirov, an associate professor of physics and physical oceanography at Memorial University of Newfoundland. “You have to look at the size of the cold water spot, not just horizontally but vertically. Then we have to determine what caused it, what’s the impact and how long will it persist.”

Like many scientists, deYoung attributes, at least in part, the slowing of the AMOC and the formation of the blue blob to two main factors: freshwater flowing from a melting Greenland ice sheet and river runoff from a warmer Arctic. A similar situation is unfolding near Antarctica, where melting ice is chilling part of the ocean. This is happening even though average sea surface temperatures globally set a record high.

“We’re still disentangling climate change and other variabilities to understand what’s happening,” says deYoung, a professor in the physics and physical oceanography department at Memorial.

The ocean’s underlying mechanism is a conveyor belt of warm water that circulates from southern latitudes to the north and then returns cooler waters back toward the equator again. For example, this motion is responsible for the Gulf Stream, which flows northward off the Southeast coast before veering across the Atlantic. Its warm waters help keep Western Europe temperate even though it is located farther north than the U.S. The churn of ocean waters also fosters marine habitats for zooplankton, fish and other aquatic life.

But an influx into the ocean of cold, fresh water, which has less salt and thus is less dense, disrupts the motion and heat exchange. If that persists, over time, a lethargic conveyor belt will no longer move water. A breakdown of the Gulf Stream could translate to colder weather in Western Europe, higher sea levels along portions of the N.C. coast and changes in marine ecosystems. Some fish could die; others could migrate. And because of the interconnectedness of the ocean currents, the effects could be international in scope.

“We can turn off the AMO circulation by adding fresh water, which could shut it down,” deYoung says. Although that is unlikely, he adds, “It is still possible that we can substantially disrupt circulation on a larger scale in the ocean.”

“Why we care about the blue blob is that it’s occurring in an area near Greenland where the water becomes cold and dense enough to act like a drain in a bathtub for the ocean,” says Jesse Farmer, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University who grew up surfing in Emerald Isle in Carteret County. “The Gulf Stream could get sucked into the drain, and it supplies the heat.”

A similar decline in the circulation occurred in 1969 in the Labrador Sea, just west of the current cold spot. A pulse of melt water from the Arctic diluted the surface ocean, which in turn halted deep water convection in that region. The subsequent circulation slowdown resulted in the what scientists called the Great Salinity Anomaly. The journal Progress in Oceanography used more dramatic language: “[It was] one of the most persistent and extreme variations in global ocean climate observed in this century.”

But as Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State, and several colleagues wrote last May in Nature Climate Change, the sea and circulation recovered — but only until the early 2000s, when the Greenland again started to shed ice and ocean circulation slowed.

The disturbance in the North Atlantic could have far-reaching implications for the mid-Atlantic region thousands of miles away. Ocean circulation creates a pressure gradient that causes water to pile up on the highest areas beneath the ocean and away from the coast, explains Mann, who also runs the university’s Earth Sciences Center. If the circulation slows or stops, the pressure decreases and the water relaxes toward the shoreline.

Many scientists did not expect the recent shifts to happen so quickly. “I thought the AMOC would change slowly, but the oscillation has been quite dramatic over short periods,” deYoung says. “We like to think of climate as an elephant moving slowly along. But the ocean system is not that simple. We’re open for more surprises.”

Mann says climate models didn’t predict such a slowdown until the next century, “but it’s already happening.”

A lack of long-term historical data has hampered scientists from fully understanding the underlying causes of an AMOC slowdown. Mud core samples from the ocean floor could yield information. However, mud accumulates very slowly at those depths, making it difficult to reconstruct a timeline, Farmer says, or predict the future of the blue blob.

“It could disappear tomorrow or it could be here for 20 years,” he says.

If the blob persists, it could briefly offset some of the effects of a warming planet. However, the supply of fish, a main livelihood for many cultures in the North Atlantic, could be diminished or altered. Some species could migrate to warmer waters, or different varieties could arrive in the colder areas.

“We’re not going to get another Ice Age,” Mann says. “And it’s not going to play out on a time scale of days, but decades. But that’s pretty fast from a societal standpoint. There are challenges in adaptation. You can’t adapt when you don’t know what’s in store.”

RALEIGH — At about 1,000 pounds and 10 feet long, the West Indian manatee, its muzzle quilled with stiff whiskers, uses its paddle-shaped tail and short flippers to navigate the warm estuaries and river mouths along the N.C. coast.

However, it’s a privilege to spot a manatee. The marine mammal is endangered in North Carolina and throughout the United States.

Now the State Natural Heritage Program, charged with collecting data on the manatee and other rare species and habitats, is itself endangered.

As innocuous as the program seems—it neither makes nor enforces rules—it nonetheless has become a political target. For the second consecutive budget cycle, state lawmakers have slashed funding for the program, from $1.5 million in 2011-12 to $750,000 in 2013-14. This year, that figure appeared to be safe until a legislative conference committee unexpectedly cut the program’s budget further, to just $400,000.

“It was a big surprise to us,” says Misty Buchanan, the program’s natural heritage inventory director.

In the first go-round, six positions were cut; unless the program can find additional private funding, another five will be eliminated. That would leave just seven people to cover the entire state.

“A lot of folks depend on heritage data,” says Bill Holman, who served as secretary of Department of Environment and Natural Resources from 1999-2001. He is now state director of the nonprofit Conservation Fund. “Limited money means not having good scientific information. That could cause the state not to make good purchases.”

In 1985, N.C. lawmakers passed the Nature Preserves Act, which established the State Natural Heritage Program. For the past 30 years, private property owners, developers and conservation trusts have voluntarily requested the help of program scientists to assess the species and habitats on land. Counties use the data to write their open space plans. State agencies such as the Department of Transportation and private corporations like Duke Energy also have consulted the data to ensure their land purchases and projects comply with federal law.

Without this information, says Cassie Gavin, director of government affairs for the Sierra Club, “we lose natural treasures and we won’t know that we’ve lost them.”

In fact, the legislation itself expressed concerns that “continued population growth and land development in North Carolina have made it necessary and desirable that areas of natural significance be identified and preserved before they are destroyed.”

Short of overturning the law, legislators are starving the program through the funding cuts. No lawmaker has publicly claimed responsibility for the reductions. However, Rep. Roger West, a Republican representing the mountain counties of Clay, Cherokee, Macon and Graham, serves on two key committees that could have determined the program’s fate: He is a vice-chairman of House Appropriations and chairman of Appropriations on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources.

West, who runs an environmental excavation company, says that when revenue numbers changed, the appropriations committee had to make additional cuts to the Natural and Economic Resources budget, about $60 million to $70 million. He denies that the program was specifically targeted.

“Everybody was on the block,” West says. “They’ll have to tighten up and do the best they can.”

However, West says he has heard complaints about the heritage program from private landowners. One situation in question involved U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s access to an “inholding,” a privately owned parcel within the Pisgah National Forest. There was a disagreement between the service and the landowner over routing. The State Natural Heritage Program was caught in the crosshairs.

“I don’t approve of them going on private land,” West says.

But program scientists don’t trespass, says Buchanan. There is a common misperception that they go on private property uninvited. “We either ask permission or are asked to go onto the land,” she said.

The timber industry also can cross swords with scientists whose findings could thwart its work.

Friends of Forestry, a political action committee affiliated with the N.C. Forest Association, contributed $500 to each of seven members of the House committee on natural resources, including West. The PAC also spread its largesse to several members of the Senate counterpart.

Calls to Chris Brown, communications director for the N.C. Forest Association, were not returned.

“The timber interests don’t want anything getting in the way of the saw blade,” says biologist John Taggart. Until September, he served on the heritage program’s advisory committee.

“These cuts impinge on the ability of the staff to oversee the protection of species that need help.”

The nine-member advisory committee itself appears to have been politicized. Although it reviews and recommends parcels for protection, its guidance is non-binding. However, the committee did not meet for nearly two years, since December 2013. That resulted in a significant backlog of proposals to review.

“I started asking questions about the meetings,” Taggart says. “They said they wanted to review the composition of committee. But when someone wants nothing to happen, it won’t happen.”

In fact, the committee did meet last week, on Sept. 29, but no one told Taggart or his fellow committee member Lynn Maguire, a Duke University professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. They had not been reappointed to the advisory committee, but found out only when Coastal Review informed them.

Scott Pohlman is the heritage program’s Conservation Incentives Program director. He says the governor’s office appointed six new commission members. Of the nine members, only one, Alan Weakley of the UNC Herbarium, was reappointed. However, he lost his chairmanship.

Three vacancies remain, and it’s unclear when they will be filled and with whom.

In addition to Weakley, the new appointments include four people from land trusts and conservancy organization. The other member is Tony Doster, who sits on the board of directors of the N.C. Forestry Association. He is also the manager of the N.C. region for Resource Management Service, a private timberland investment firm based in Alabama. The company made news in 2013 and 2014 when it and another private investment group offered to buy Hofmann Forest from N.C. State University for $130 million. Several faculty members and environmental groups sued the university over permitting issues; in the meantime, the deal fell through.

As part of state government reorganization, the heritage program has moved from the newly named Department of Environmental Quality to the Department of Cultural and Natural Resources. “They have been very supportive of our mission,” Buchanan says.

The cuts have come as demand for the heritage program services have increased, Buchanan says. Commercial and residential developers, and energy companies exploring for natural gas, for example, need the program’s data. But with fewer people in the field, it will take longer to collect the data, and there will be less of it.

“Conditions on the ground change,” Buchanan says. “We have to verify and sometimes correct the data. The work will never be done.”

Meanwhile, she is trying to close the funding gap through several grants from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and NatureServ, the umbrella organization for all of the states’ natural heritage programs.

Buchanan says she hopes that in the next short session, lawmakers will reinstate the funding.

“We will help people understand how business and industry uses our data,” she says. “Maybe they’ll give us another chance.”

Along much of the North Carolina coast, the first week of March was ushered in by intermittent rain and fog, with a stiff, offshore breeze. But on the other side of the world, in the Pacific Ocean, the trade winds were dying. When they revived, instead of blowing east to west, their usual direction, they reversed in strong bursts.

This about-face and a confluence of other meteorological events have triggered one of the strongest El Niños seasons since 1950. It is likely to peak in late fall and early winter before ending next spring. As a result, the Pacific has spawned eight hurricanes and 11 typhoons, while the Atlantic has experienced a quiet season. In fact, Currituck, Camden, Pasquotank and Perquimans counties are classified as abnormally dry by the N.C. Drought Monitor.

It’s unclear whether natural forces alone have contributed to the intensity of the 2015 El Niño. The atmosphere in the Pacific may naturally vary, or the system could be destabilized by other external forces. “There’s not a consensus on how human impacts affect an El Niño,” says Phil Klotzbach of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, who writes the seasonal hurricane forecasts. “That’s a huge question. We don’t fully understand the physics of what drives an El Niño.”

We do know they tend to occur every two to seven years, and last from nine to 12 months. An El Niño begins when trade winds, having weakened or reversed course, generate a Kelvin wave, a deep sloshing beneath the ocean’s surface. In the last nine months, three Kelvin waves have crossed the Pacific. Each one has lumbered eastward along the equator on a three-month journey from Indonesia to South America. It has dragged warm water with it, increasing sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific—as much as 3.6 degrees this year.

These warm waters release more heat into the atmosphere, causing the air to rise and sparking storms. Larger circulation patterns in the atmosphere alter the jet stream, calming the weather patterns in the Atlantic basin more than 5,000 miles away.

“When the air rises one place, it sinks in another,” Klotzbach says. “Rarely does the entire globe go crazy.”

In a typical Atlantic hurricane season, the 30-year average calls for 12 named storms, including six hurricanes, — two of them major—although these systems may not affect the U.S. mainland.

Historical data, though, points to a correlation between El Niño events and a lower number of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms:

• In 1982, considered a strong El Niño year, meteorologists recorded less activity: just six tropical storms, two hurricanes and one major hurricane in the Atlantic.
• In 1997, also a strong El Niño season, there were eight tropical storms, three hurricanes and one major hurricane.
• The last El Niño, classified as moderate, occurred in 2009. There were nine tropical storms, three hurricanes and two major hurricanes.

So far, this year’s season has logged four tropical storms:

• Ana, which made landfall as a tropical storm near Myrtle Beach, S.C.;
• Bill, which came ashore in Texas, causing coastal and inland flooding;
• Claudette, which did not affected the United States and brought only showers and wind to eastern Nova Scotia and Newfoundland;
• and Erika, which dissipated before it reached Florida, where it dropped heavy rain.

As for hurricanes, strong wind shear quashed two storms before they approached the East Coast. A Category 1, Hurricane Fred died after moving through the Cape Verde Islands; and Hurricane Danny peaked at Category 3 before reaching the Leeward Islands.

“They died a glorious death in the middle of the ocean,” Klotzbach says.

This season, hurricane forecasters have estimated the chance for a hurricane to affect North Carolina at 14 percent, compared to the average probability of 28 percent. For a major hurricane, the chances drop to 3 percent, compared to the average of 8 percent.

Hurricane season officially ends Nov. 30.

However, just because chances are lower than average does not mean that a hurricane cannot strike North Carolina. State climatologist Ryan Boyles notes that 1992 was also an El Niño year, and only one hurricane hit the East Coast. That storm was Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed 63,000 homes and damaged more than 100,000 others in Miami-Dade County, Fla. At least 65 people died. At the time, Hurricane Andrew was the costliest in history, causing $2.6 billion in damage.

“Very few people make planning decisions based on seasonal forecasts,” Boyles says.

“It only takes one, and that’s what we prepare for,” says Julia Jarema, communications officer for N.C. Emergency Management.

Gabe Vecchi is the head of the Climate Variations and Predictability Group at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. He says several factors could influence an active El Niño season, and thus a calm Atlantic basin. “It’s hard to point to one thing,” he said. “There’s more than one actor involved.”

One factor is the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the AMO for short. This circulation pattern runs in 25-to-30-year cycles, and affects sea surface temperatures and sea level pressure—and by extension, hurricane formation. From the 1960s to the first half of the 1990s, the AMO phase cooled the oceans, and there was comparatively less intense hurricane activity. Then in 1995, Boyles says, “things flipped” and we’ve had warmer ocean waters—and more hurricanes—since, although that pattern could be changing.

Scientists are still trying to understand how the AMO behaves. It appears to be linked to regional and global climate trends, according to NOAA. It is driven by swings in temperatures in the “Atlantic conveyer belt” or major ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, off the N.C. coast that move warm surface water north to higher latitudes or cold northern waters south.

The conveyor belt, though, is sensitive to salinity levels in the ocean, a NOAA study reports. Those salinity levels can vary depending on water evaporation—which increases the ocean’s saltiness—or “freshening,” which decreases it. Lower salinity equals cooler temperatures and less frequent hurricanes.

What causes the ocean to lose its salt? A melting of the ice pack, ocean circulation patterns and rain can all dilute salinity. This, what NOAA called the “Great Salinity Anomaly” occurred in the mid-1960s and lasted for roughly 25 to 30 years.

For the past 20 years until recently, the pattern seems to have reversed, and the waters near Greenland have become saltier. Salinity levels appear to be decreasing again. This contributes to a cooling of the waters in the North Atlantic and a warming in the South—a pattern that began last November.

That cooling, plus higher air pressure, stronger wind shear, volcanic ash and even dust blowing off Africa, dampens hurricane formation.

“We’re not sure the AMO is fully natural in its occurrence,” Vecchi says.

The strongest El Nino on record may be forming in the Pacific Ocean. A “Godzilla” El Nino, one forecaster called it. That, of course, set off the breathless reporting seen in this YouTube video compiled by SignsofThyComing, which we assume to be one of those END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR sort of places.

Over the last century, greenhouse gases have warmed the planet, which could affect the strength of the AMO. Deforestation and farming practices can produce more dust and pollution. “All these ingredients: how much does each one do?” Vecchi says.

An anomaly has also appeared in the Pacific Ocean that has contributed to a stormy Hawaiian summer. This is the second consecutive year that warmer waters have approached Hawaii, which usually is insulated from hurricanes by cooler waters around the island.  However, on July 12, satellite imagery showed five named tropical cyclones queued up from Mexico to Japan.

Scientists are studying an unusual formation—what Klotzbach calls a “previously unobserved” band of extremely warm water—north of the equator, stretching from western Mexico to near Hawaii.

El Niño conditions likely contributed to the band’s formation, but Vecchi says, “It’s not part of the El Niño; it’s a neighbor of El Niño. It’s not typical. This hasn’t occurred with other El Niños.”

By next March, the El Niño will likely begin to lose steam. Warmer waters, carried from the western Pacific, will spread east and toward the poles. When this happens, deeper, cooler ocean waters move closer to the surface.

However, it’s difficult to predict how the end of the El Niño will affect next summer’s Atlantic hurricane season. “There have been big advances, but there is always going to be inherent uncertainty,” Vecchi says.

Boyles, the state climatologist, says the science still needs better observation data and more powerful computers. “We still don’t understand how hurricanes develop and intensify,” he says. “We don’t know the state of the atmosphere.”