Hurricane Season 2023

Resident participation meetings throughout unincorporated Lee County and in municipalities are planned in August to receive public comment and input on the Draft Action Plan for the $1.1 billion Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Tampa-area non-profit Rebuilding Together to distribute free hurricane supplies Monday in Arcadia.

With Tropical Storm Don spinning way out in the central Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center is now watching a small area of low pressure several hundred miles west-southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands that could become Tropical Depression Emily at some point.

Officials at the National Hurricane Center in Miami announced early on Friday morning that an area of low pressure centered over 1000 miles west of the Azores had developed enough to be classified as a subtropical storm. Its name: Don.

No threat is seen from a low pressure area in the Central Atlantic.

Volunteers helped distribute solar-powered lights Saturday to several Southwest Florida neighborhoods hit hard by last year’s hurricane as part of the "Be The Light" initiative sponsored by Better Together.

Forecasters from Colordo State University forecast now call for an above-average Atlantic basin hurricane season in 2023, although uncertainty with this outlook is larger than normal.

Saildrone and NOAA kicked off the third-annual Atlantic Hurricane mission this week with an event at NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida, where all the tools NOAA is using to study hurricanes were on display.

“The Atlantic is awfully warm this year,” said Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, adding that it’s partly a result of global warming, natural variability and the ocean’s recovering from sulfate aerosols pollution that cooled it decades ago. Emanuel noted that in the entire Atlantic Ocean, not just the tropical Atlantic, it’s not unusual to have storms in June.

Tropical Storm Bret is expected to continue intensifying the next few days and likely hit hurricane status late Wednesday or early Thursday.