Weather forecasters and emergency preparedness planners across the Southeast are wondering what to do now that those spiraling whirls of wind and rain painted across satellite maps and radar screens for the past several weeks are virtually no more.

A couple weeks ago it was a far different story when no fewer than four hurricanes and tropical storms were in various stages of development throughout the Atlantic, each seemingly with its own insatiable agenda in mind for some unlucky locale along the U.S. coastline.

Now, only Tropical Storm Lisa stubbornly hangs on as it rapidly races into the North Atlantic, and then is expected to curve eastward and weaken into an extratropical low-pressure system that will eventually bring rain to northern Europe.

However, meteorologists are quick to point out that we’re not out of the woods yet and that hurricane season, which lasts until Nov. 30, could still have plenty of bite left in it.

The past 60 days even caught the hurricane experts by surprise. Storm forecaster William Gray of Colorado State University said in a report released Friday that it’s been “an unusual season of unprecedented Florida landfall events and intense long lived tropical cyclones. The large number of major hurricanes was not anticipated.”

The report went on to say that this has been the most active tropical season through September since 1950 - more than twice as active, in fact, as the full-season average from 1950-2000. So far, the 2004 hurricane season has seen 12 named storms, seven of those developing into hurricanes and six growing into major storms. Hurricane Ivan entered the record books as the most intensely sustained hurricane of any tropical cyclone since 1900.

The hurricane forecast for October calls for the possibility of three named storms, two of them developing into hurricanes, but none evolving into the major systems that have been seen this season.

The chance for tropical storm development in November is expected to be minimal, as is usually the case for that time of year, the report said. However, it emphasized that the likelihood of storm landfall somewhere in the U.S.-Caribbean area is still just above the average for October and November.

Forecasters said that many factors have come together to contribute to this unusually active season, especially extremely warm sea-surface temperatures combined with fairly low levels of wind shear.

However, they emphasize that global warming, as some people have been quick to point a finger to, has no connection. They say that increased activity would have been evident within the world’s other tropical storm basins if global warming were involved, which hasn’t been the case.

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