Forecast calls for active hurricane season

Sure, we had it easy during the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season — not one hurricane made landfall in the U.S. last year — but things might be a little more complicated this year. Colorado State University forecaster William Gray is expecting 17 named storms in the Atlantic this year, with a pretty strong chance that one of them will hit the U.S. Better start buying that plywood and bottled water now.

According to Gray's team's forecast, there's a 74 percent chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the U.S. coast — that's a far better chance than the long-term average. The chance of a storm hitting the Gulf Coast between the Florida panhandle and Brownsville is about 49 percent, the forecast says. If things play out as expected, things still won't get close to the amount of activity we had in 2005, the most active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history with 28 named storms, seven of them major hurricanes that caused some $120 billion in damage.

The CSU team will be issuing updated forecasts on May 31, Aug. 3, Sept. 4 and Oct. 2, with a summary of the year's activity — just in case you need to catch up — coming in late November.