Why do so many storms and hurricanes form near the Gulf of Mexico?

The damage done by Hurricane Helene across the southeast of the US is catastrophic.

Thousands of people remain missing, and the death count is expected to continue to rise, with search and rescue operations still ongoing in some areas of western North Carolina. Though not touching the Gulf of Mexico, the Carolinas and Tennessee were pounded by the hurricane, highlighting the danger for residents beyond the coastal region during this dangerous period of the year. Aside from North Carolina, the states affected are all led by Republicans, who, if not outright deny the existence of human-made climate change, play down the threat in their rhetoric, or ignore the problem altogether.

None of these leaders have noted the increased threat to their region faced by climate change; nonetheless, they fail to mitigate its impacts by adapting the state’s infrastructure to be more resilient when more intense storms strike. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats should be cautious of laying the blame at the feet of climate change with messaging that makes it seem like nothing could have been done to prevent the damage. Again, emissions could have been reduced, the state’s critical infrastructure should have been evaluated for its climate readiness, and the proper investments should have been made. Perhaps not all of the damage could have been avoided, but disaster preparedness must be calibrated for the worst possible scenario because, as events have shown, they can materialize and could happen again. Climate change should not be used as a shield from criticism when infrastructure failures occur, and state and federal governments must take responsibility for their decades of inaction that have contributed to the devastation seen across the southeast.

As communities begin the long process of recovering from the destruction, the National Weather Service is warning that another storm might begin to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center says there is a fifty percent chance that the storm will materialize in the next seven days and has alerted coastal states around the Gulf.

The land boundaries that form the Gulf give storms a warmer body of water to form and intensify in. However, they also force them to storm into a confined space, where it is likely to make landfall rather than head back out into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Gulf of Mexico and the conditions for a hurricane

In 2023, the National Centers for Environmental Information reported that the water in the Gulf of Mexico “warmed at twice the rate of warming in the global ocean near the sea surface.” This rapid warning helps explain the intensity of the storms that have been witnessed in the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Caribbean nations over the last decade. Warmer waters, in and outside the Gulf of Mexico, fuel tropical storms, allowing them to intensify rapidly. Researchers at the University of Alabama published an article in Nature in 2023 that underscored the challenges rapid warming creates for forecasters.

The team found that marine heatwaves, common during hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, made rapid intensification fifty percent more likely. However, the authors note that more research needs to be done into how these heatwaves impact intensification so that forecasting models are better prepared to estimate the strength of a storm as it makes landfall and travels inland or back out to sea.