What kind of hurricane season should we expect this year?

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season starts today and continues through the end of November.

Every year, Houston Matters sets aside some time to help you and yours prepare for the season, with special attention paid to those new Houstonians among us who haven’t been through tropical storms before. (They’re…uh….well, not much fun. You do need to prepare for them).

For a number of years, when tropical weather threatened this area, we’d turn to Francisco Sanchez from Harris County’s emergency management office. These days, he’s associate administrator for the Small Business Administration’s Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience.

In the audio above, we talk with him about preparing for the next six months and its occasional tropical storm threats.

We also talk with NOAA’s chief hurricane forecaster Dr. Matthew Rosencrans about the kind of season we might expect (the forecast says to expect a near-normal season), including the likely number and severity of storms.