The little boy who would grow up to become one of the country’s best hurricane forecasters was 5 years old and huddled with family in the basement of their home in Plymouth, Mass., listening to Hurricane Gloria rip apart the neighborhood outside.
The storm left the Atlantic Ocean to first make landfall on Long Island, then again near Westport in Connecticut before sideswiping Plymouth as the hurricane was weakening.
Today, Phil Klotzbach is one of the pre-eminent tropical storm forecasters and, in person, he’s clearly a hurricane encyclopedia. He knows which storms of note did what, and where and why the cyclone probably made landfall where it did.
He talks about Hurricane Melissa, which occurred late in the 2025 hurricane season and creamed Jamaica, in such detail that it's amazing to know he wasn’t there. Melissa made landfall on October 28 — it was a Tuesday — near New Hope on the island’s south coast. Melissa was a Category 5 at landfall with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour. Melissa bested Hurricane Gilbert for the strongest storm to ever hit the island. Melissa tied the record for the strongest Atlantic-basin hurricane ever recorded.
“Hurricane Gloria in 1985 was really what got me fascinated in studying hurricanes for a living,” Klotzbach said. “While the storm made landfall in Connecticut, it still brought very strong winds to our neighborhood and caused a ton of trees to come down. I was fascinated by the damage that a storm like that could cause, and ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what makes hurricanes tick.”
He was, by his own description, "born with a defective weather gene.” As a boy, he asked his parents to print out flight maps of the United States so he could draw weather fronts on them and dream up storm scenarios that buried Massachusetts in snow.
When not in sand or snow or involved in hurricane research and forecasting, his feet are usually in some type of special sneaker. An avid runner and climber, he’ll proudly, but humbly, tell you he hiked 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Then attended Colorado State University, where he received his master’s in atmospheric science in 2002.
After that, he climbed all 54, 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado, completed nine marathons, and six ultra-marathons.
Now with a doctorate, he is a senior research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, has authored more than 100 peer‑reviewed papers, and is the face of the world’s most respected non-governmental hurricane season forecasting program.
In 2006, William Gray, the CSU pioneer in scientific tropical cyclone forecasting, handed Klotzbach primary responsibility for the seasonal hurricane forecasts — the famous predictions issued each spring by the Tropical Meteorology Project in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. That is the program's full name, and it has been issuing forecasts since 1984, when Gray published his first data-driven seasonal outlook.
Colorado State University will issue its first Atlantic hurricane season forecast for 2026 on April 9, followed by updates in June, July, and August as the season draws closer. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30.
"He was, by his own description, 'born with a defective weather gene.' ”
I first interviewed Klotzbach on a sunny but windy afternoon on the campus of Florida Gulf Coast University. He nearly shouts when he talks, and I’m still not sure if that is because he’s forever excited about what he does, or he knows projecting his voice is a good thing during an interview with TV cameras. But I’ve seen him lecture several times before I interviewed him, and he shout-talks then, too. He also talks with his hands, but not idly, or without purpose: Envisioning things in the air is a very effective technique when teaching people about the complexities of hurricanes and their implications.
A few days later, on the phone, I fact-checked with the famed hurricane forecaster as he was sitting in a chair next to his wife on St. Pete Beach. He told me how great it was to have his bare feet dug into the sand. Three times. Understandable coming from a guy who makes hurricane forecasts from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which averages four feet of snow each winter and sits about 1,000 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and almost double that from the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s akin to having a world-class arctic research center in Miami Beach.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: So you told me, to understand hurricanes, one has to learn about the difference between the air pressure and the wind speed when they see a hurricane forecast.
A: Yeah. The reason why we have winds in a hurricane is because of a difference in pressure between kind of what's going on outside of the storm, kind of just like the environment around it, versus what's in the what's right at the center. And so if the pressure in the center of a hurricane is very low, it tends to be a stronger storm. So normally, you know, the wind and the pressure are very closely related, because basically the pressure is looking at, say, in the eye of the hurricane, so where it's basically right in the center, but you look at, you measure the atmospheric pressure, and if you look historically, and you look at wind versus pressure and how much damage storms cause. They both are very strongly correlated. If you have a lot of strong winds in a hurricane, it's going to cause a lot of damage, but the pressure actually correlates a little bit better with the overall damage. In the case of Hurricane Melissa, which caused a tremendous amount of damage in Jamaica, some of their insurance contracts were actually settled based on the barometric pressure readings they were getting once the storm came onshore, as opposed to wind. So interesting.
Q: In recent years, several Gulf storms such as Hurricane Milton have strengthened very quickly, either out in the Gulf or just before landfall. What specific conditions in the Gulf make that sudden jump in strength likely?
A: Obviously, a big topic right now is rapid intensification. And are these storms undergoing rapid intensification, you know, more than they used to. It kind of depends on what threshold you look at and exactly where. But certainly, rapid intensification is something you know. It can obviously pose a challenge, you know, in terms of getting ready and preparedness. But one good thing is that our, and the National Hurricane Center's, forecasts of rapid intensification have improved tremendously in recent years, and in the case of Hurricane Melissa last year, they actually forecast it to become a category five hurricane when it was only a category one, and that was due to just a lot of really good, solid model guidance, both from kind of your typical kind of weather forecast models we've had for years, and also some of these new AI models, helping to kind of increase the confidence that it would really, really explode. And it did.
Q: Has there ever been a comparable in modern history to how quickly Melissa moved from a tropical storm to a category five?
A: When it comes to its landfall intensity, it was one of the strongest on record. So if you look at, say, the winds when it made landfall in Jamaica, 185 miles an hour, it was basically tied for the strongest landfall anywhere in the Atlantic on record. That was with the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which was devastating to the Florida Keys, as well as Hurricane Dorian back in 2019 in the northwestern Bahamas, primarily on Abaco Island. So we have seen storms about that strong, but obviously one of the strongest on record, and obviously caused a tremendous amount of damage.
Q: Have any intensified as quickly as Melissa did?
A: Hurricane Milton back in 2024 intensified at a faster rate. The fastest intensification rate of all would be back in 2005 with Hurricane Wilma that intensified by, I think, about 100 miles an hour in a day, something like that. It was insane.
Q: Late-season Gulf storms in October and November can be especially dangerous for Florida. In simple terms, what makes late-season storms different from the ones earlier in the season? If anything?
A: Historically, about 15% of your storms form in October, November, but over 50% in the Caribbean. There's a lot of really warm ocean water down there, and so normally, kind of the rest of the Atlantic gets not so conducive for storm formation. But the Caribbean can be extremely conducive. Those storms can just kind of go west and make landfall in Central America. But sometimes, if there's an area of low pressure, it can pick up the storm and take it north or northeast. Those will be the storms. Obviously, they can cause significant impacts to the US. It was late September, storm like Hurricane Helene. Obviously, like Hurricane Ian, late in September. But then also you even have storms in October, like Hurricane Michael in 2018, they goes in North or a little bit northeast, causing all sorts of significant impacts. So basically, late season storms can become quite intense in the Caribbean, and then if you just have an area of low pressure to kind of pull that storm up, it can cause really significant problems for Florida, or, say, up into the northern Gulf.
Q: What about that lull last year? It was a surprisingly quiet stretch right within the normal peak of the season. What did the lull teach you guys about, not only it happening, but the limits of our forecasting?
A: A lot. There's a lot there. And so the last two years, 2024 as well. So in 2024, our group at CSU, and pretty much every group, was saying this is going to be one of the busiest hurricane seasons on record. We had a Category Five, the earliest Category Five on record, with Hurricane Beryl. And we thought, okay, we're off to the races. This is going to be just an absolutely berserk year. Then we went through a really pronounced quiet period during the time when the season is normally at its busiest. And then in 2024, the end of the season was obviously crazy busy. And we had hurricanes Helene and Milton, which obviously were extremely damaging for Florida this past year. Similarly, we had hurricane Aaron, which is a category five in August, and things were trucking along pretty, kind of a little bit above normal. And then we went through a really pronounced quiet period, and then followed by a busy end of the season, punctuated by the last storm of the year, Hurricane Melissa. And so while those lulls were caused by somewhat different factors, really, in 2025 the big driver of that lull was that we had basically what we call a tropical upper tropospheric trough. And it's basically low pressure high up in the atmosphere, say, 20,000 to 30,000 feet. It often will develop in the central Atlantic. When that develops, it creates a lot of vertical wind shear. So that change in wind direction with height in the atmosphere is very strong, takes apart anything that's trying to get going. And that was a very robust feature for about two to three weeks. Once that feature weakened, then the shear got a lot more conducive, and then we started to see more storm formations.
Q: So Florida's kind of had a streaky hurricane history. We seem to swing between these long, quiet stretches and these clusters of damaging hurricanes. In your view, does the hurricane risk for the Gulf Coast? Does that tend to come in bunches, or are they spread out more evenly over time statistically?
A: For example, in 2004-2005 Florida was hurricanes over and over and over again. If you had gone to Vegas at the end of 2005 and said, 'I bet Florida is going to get zero hurricane landfalls in the next 10 years,' you'd got some really good odds. I would have given you some really good odds of it. Yet Florida, for 10 years, did not have one hurricane hit the state, which the odds are extremely low. If we were to base it on completely historical odds of going 10 years in a row with no hurricanes. But then, since then, until 2025 Florida was hit quite a bit. But obviously, even in 2020, extremely busy season, 30 storms in the Atlantic, and not one hurricane in Florida. So, you know, it's just, it's so there are these kinds of, you know, you can get, get lucky or get unlucky. But overall, you know, Florida does have a large amount of coastline, so there is a fairly significant part of the, you know, basically, there's a large enough area of coastline that the odds of it getting hit in a year, historically, are higher than any other state.
Q: As climate change becomes more and more of a reality, and you know, the Gulf level is rising, and temperatures are usually hotter, and all the other dynamics that I'm sure you're very familiar with. How does that throw a wrench in your models, and have you accommodated for them? Or is it just rapidly evolving, and you guys are evolving too?
A: Some of these climate model forecasts that we're using are helping with some of that. For example, in 2023, we had a strong El Nino, which historically was always like strong El Nino, quiet season, but we also had a record warm Atlantic. And so the question is, okay, historically, we didn't have that situation in our statistical model, but we used climate models that said, Okay, you're going to have a strong El Nino, a record warm Atlantic, but the shear is going to be low. So we said, Okay, we're going with a busy season. And it was, and it would have been something probably 10 years, 20 years earlier, maybe not because we wouldn't have, we would have used the historical thing, which was the strong on the dominates, but because the climate models were saying that the shear was going to be low. And these models basically use the kind of the equations that govern the atmosphere and ocean. So even if you're in a situation you hadn't observed historically, those equations should still work to tell you kind of how the circulation is going to respond. So I think that can help, that can help us for kind of some of these, like outlier, strange events, you know, that we may see in the future. So, you know, certainly, as you know, with climate change, with natural changes in the system, like all this stuff, we're trying to kind of stay ahead of it by using some of these, more you know, more techniques, some techniques that necessarily weren't available to us 10 to 20 years ago, just because the modeling wasn't where it is now.
Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.
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