The Houston Chronicle reports a lot of people in the weather forecasting business say it's time to discard the old "Category 1-5" system of rating the strength of hurricanes.
They say that system -- known as the Saffir-Simpson Scale -- only tells us the storm's wind speed. It says little about the storm's tidal surge which causes the most deaths and property damage.
We knew it couldn't last. We went two full months into hurricane season without a tropical storm anywhere near Texas or Louisiana, but we may not be able to feel safe for much longer. There's now a storm "out there" that could very well come our way and cause major problems.
The National Hurricane Center has released its hurricane forecast for the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season that begins June 1st. There's a sliver of good news in this forecast, because the experts are expecting fewer storms than we've seen in recent years.
The official start of hurricane season is just a few weeks away, and emergency preparedness officials in all Gulf and Atlantic coast states are getting ready for it.
No matter how many major storms this or that expert is predicting, people who've been through hurricanes can tell you it just takes one to change your life forever.
Houston Chronicle Science Reporter Eric Berger is reading the meteorological tea leaves, and he reports today there's an outside chance that a tropical depression in the Caribbean is on a track that could take it into the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas - soon.
We have good news and we have bad news. First the good news. It's going to rain, a lot, in South and Central Texas in the coming days. The bad news? It's because of a tropical storm now moving across the Gulf of Mexico and heading straight for the lower Texas coast.