El Nino helps Mexico duck a potentially bad hurricane season

In this Friday, Oct. 23, 2015, file photo, a couple looks out to sea as rainfall increases with the approach of Hurricane Patricia in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Mexico weathered a record eastern Pacific hurricane season with almost no deaths and relatively little damage, given the intensity of this year’s storms. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2015 hurricane season report released Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015, Patricia was “the strongest hurricane on record in the Western Hemisphere” just before it struck a sparsely populated stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast. AP FILE PHOTO

MEXICO CITY — Mexico weathered a record eastern Pacific hurricane season with almost no deaths and relatively little damage, given the intensity of this year’s storms.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its 2015 hurricane season report Tuesday, saying that “this is the first year since reliable record keeping began in 1971 that the eastern Pacific saw nine major hurricanes,” which are defined as Category 3 or higher with winds of at least 111 mph (178 kph).

Turning to the worst of those storms, the report noted that Hurricane Patricia was “the strongest hurricane on record in the Western Hemisphere” just before it struck a sparsely populated stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast in October. But while Patricia caused tens of millions of dollars in damage, there was no confirmed death attributed to the storm — or from any of the other eight major hurricanes in the eastern pacific this year.

Mexicans have wondered why the country escaped any major disaster, and President Enrique Pena Nieto even attributed the lack of damage to prayer circles and “the faith of the Mexican people.”

READ: ‘Yolanda’-scale storms may be ‘the new normal’ | El Niño keeps temps warm

But Dr. Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, said Tuesday the same thing that made Pacific hurricanes stronger — the El Nino weather phenomenon — may have also made them less deadly. El Nino is an ocean-warming phenomenon seen once every few years that can change weather patterns globally.

“El Nino made both the central and eastern Pacific hurricane seasons more intense,” Bell wrote. “El Nino also caused the storms in the eastern Pacific to form farther west from the west coast of Mexico, and to also track more westward. As a result most of those storms remained over the open ocean throughout their life.”

Bell attributed the lack of deaths from Patricia “to excellent responses from emergency managers and citizens before the storm struck.”

The Atlantic hurricane season was below normal, with 11 named storms.

The 2015 hurricane season ended Monday, and there is no telling what next year may be like.

Bell wrote that “sometimes El Nino is a multi-year phenomenon, but we cannot currently tell whether this one will be.” He said computer models for now are pointing to the current El Nino dissipating late next spring.