Weather Watch: Hurricane season roars into life

Just when I was starting to doubt that the northern hemisphere was even going to have a hurricane season both the Atlantic and western Pacific have roared into life with several named storms currently active.

Click here to see a map of Atlantic storms.

Hurricane Earl is the headline grabber - it's a category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale. That means it has sustained winds of 215km/h and gusts much higher. Earl pounded the Leeward Islands - these are the chain of islands in the eastern Caribbean and are home to numerous resorts.

Earl scraped past to the north, the eye clearly seen on the rain radar images in the area (let me point out that even Puerto Rico has rain radar images that are free to the public every 15 minutes!) and it was quite a magnificent sight watching this monster move past the radar. It's not something you see very often so - the eye of a hurricane being detected by land based rain radars. When you see them it really is quite spectacular.

Earl is now chugging along towards the eastern United States. A direct hit looks unlikely but it's most likely going to skirt up the coast and with so many eastern regions being low lying I'd say flooding and severe coastal erosion will be highly likely as far north as New York.

The weird thing about Earl is what is behind him. In his wake is a much weaker storm - but a named tropical storm none the less. Tropical Storm Fiona is weak compared to a hurricane but in New Zealand standards it would be considered a severe storm. While tropical storms often form in the same area at the same time the thing that makes Fiona unusual is that she is going to hit the same islands that just Earl did only 48 hours later. It's just as well that Fiona isn't likely to reach hurricane status.

Meanwhile Danielle, who made the headlines last week near Bermuda as a Category 4 hurricane, is now out in the open waters of the Atlantic. She may end up impacting Ireland or England as a stormy system next week.

In the western Pacific there are a couple of systems active. Typhoon Kompasu is heading towards Seoul in South Korea and could cause some issues there.

The other system is a tropical storm (before they become typhoons or hurricanes they become tropical storms, this is when sustained winds hit gale force - 62km/h - double that and it reaches hurricane status). This tropical storm has a fantastic name - Lionrock. I don't know why I like it but I do. Lionrock is heading towards Taiwan.

There's a lot of activity in the western Pacific - which isn't good news. China certainly doesn't need any more heavy rain but both of these systems may just do that.

Going back to the Atlantic Hurricane season and American forecasters at the start of the season predicted the 2010 season would be a repeat of the devastating 2005 season that created Katrina. Well, in comparison, 2010 is quieter so far. This time in 2005 the season was at least 5 storms ahead - nearly double where we are now.

So far this Atlantic season we've had Alex, Bonnie, Colin, Danielle, Earl and Fiona. Is it weird that I didn't even have to look those names up? I just knew them? Someone's a weather nerd.

By the way - I'm looking forward to see what happens 3 storms from now - when we have Tropical Storm Igor. What a fantastic name that is.