U.S. forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are expecting an above-normal 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, with 13 to 19 named storms, and 6 to 10 of those becoming hurricanes. But, how do they know what’s likely to happen months in the future? I’m an atmospheric scientist who studies extreme weather. Let’s take a look at what Atlantic hurricane forecasts are based on and why those forecasts can shift during the season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
What goes into a seasonal forecast
Think of the preseason hurricane forecast as the 30,000-foot view: It can’t predict if or when a storm will hit a particular location, but it can offer insight into how many storms are likely to form throughout the entire Atlantic, and how active the season overall might be. These outlooks rely heavily on two large-scale climate factors. The first is the sea surface temperature in areas where tropical cyclones tend to form and grow. Hurricanes draw their energy from warm ocean water. So when the Atlantic is unusually warm, as it has been in recent years, it provides more fuel for storms to form and intensify.Once water temperatures are 79 degrees Fahrenheit (26 degrees Celsius), hurricanes can form. Most of the Gulf was above that by late May 2025.NOAA/NESDIS The second key ingredient that meteorologists have their eye on is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which forecasters refer to as ENSO. ENSO is a climate cycle that shifts every few years between three main phases: El Niño, La Niña, and a neutral space that lives somewhere in between. During El Niño, winds over the Atlantic high up in the troposphere – roughly 25,000 to 40,000 feet – strengthen and can disrupt storms and hurricanes. La Niña, on the other hand, tends to reduce these winds, making it easier for storms to form and grow. When you look over the historical hurricane record, La Niña years have tended to be busier than their El Niño counterparts, as we saw from 2020 through 2023. We’re in the neutral phase as the 2025 hurricane season begins, and probably will be for at least a few more months. That means upper-level winds aren’t particularly hostile to hurricanes, but they’re not exactly rolling out the red carpet either. At the same time, sea surface temperatures are running warmer than the 30-year average, but not quite at the record-breaking levels seen in some recent seasons. Taken together, these conditions point to a moderately above-average hurricane season. It’s important to emphasize that these factors merely load the dice, tilting the odds toward more or fewer storms, but not guaranteeing an outcome. A host of other variables influence whether a storm actually forms, how strong it becomes, and whether it ever threatens land.
The smaller influences forecasters can’t see yet
Once hurricane season is underway, forecasters start paying close attention to shorter-term influences. These subseasonal factors evolve quickly enough that they don’t shape the entire season. However, they can noticeably raise or lower the chances for storms developing in the coming two to four weeks. One factor is dust lofted from the Sahara Desert by strong winds and carried from east to west across the Atlantic. These dust plumes tend to suppress hurricanes by drying out the atmosphere and reducing sunlight that reaches the ocean surface. Dust outbreaks are next-to-impossible to predict months in advance, but satellite observations of growing plumes can give forecasters a heads-up a couple weeks before the dust reaches the primary hurricane development region off the coast of Africa.Dust blowing in from the Sahara Desert can tamp down hurricane activities by shading the ocean over the main development region for hurricanes and drying out the atmosphere, just off the African coast. This plume spread over 2,000 miles in June 2020.NASA Another key ingredient that doesn’t go into seasonal forecasts but becomes important during the season are African easterly waves. These “waves” are clusters of thunderstorms that roll off the West African coast, tracking from east to west across the ocean. Most major storms in the Atlantic basin, especially in the peak months of August and September, can trace their origins back to one of these waves. Forecasters monitor strong waves as they begin their westward journey across the Atlantic, knowing they can provide some insight about potential risks to U.S. interests one to two weeks in advance. Also in this subseasonal mix is the Madden–Julian Oscillation. The MJO is a wave-like pulse of atmospheric activity that moves slowly around the tropics every 30 to 60 days. When the MJO is active over the Atlantic, it enhances the formation of thunderstorms associated with hurricanes. In its suppressed phase, storm activity tends to die down. The MJO doesn’t guarantee storms – or a lack of them – but it turns up or down the odds. Its phase and position can be tracked two or three weeks in advance. Lastly, forecasters will talk about the Loop Current, a deep river of warm water that flows from the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico. When storms pass over the Loop Current or its warm eddies, they can rapidly intensify because they are drawing energy from not just the warm surface water but from warm water that’s tens of meters deep. The Loop Current has helped power several historic Gulf storms, including Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Ida in 2021.The Loop Current stretched well into the Gulf in May 2022. The scale, in meters, shows the maximum depth at which temperatures were 78 F (26 C) or greater.Nick Shay/University of Miami, CC BY-ND But the Loop Current is always shifting. Its strength and location in early summer may look very different by late August or September. Combined, these subseasonal signals help forecasters fine-tune their outlooks as the season unfolds.
Where hurricanes form shifts over the months
Where storms are most likely to form and make landfall also changes as the pages of the calendar turn. In early summer, the Gulf of Mexico warms up faster than the open Atlantic, making it a notable hotspot for early-season tropical storm development, especially in June and July. The Texas coast, Louisiana, and the Florida Panhandle often face a higher early-season risk than locations along the Eastern seaboard.These are generally the busiest areas during each month of hurricane season, but that doesn’t mean hurricanes won’t make landfall elsewhere.NOAA By August and September, the season reaches its peak. This is when those waves moving off the coast of Africa become a primary source of storm activity. These long-track storms are sometimes called “Cape Verde hurricanes” because they originate near the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast. While many stay over open water, others can gather steam and track toward the Caribbean, Florida or the Carolinas. Later in the hurricane season, storms are more likely to form in the western Atlantic or Caribbean, where waters are still warm and upper-level winds remain favorable. These late-season systems have a higher probability of following atypical paths, as Sandy did in 2012 when it struck the New York City region and Milton did in 2024 before making landfall in Florida. At the end of the day, the safest way to think about hurricane season is this: If you live along the coast, don’t let your guard down. Areas susceptible to hurricanes are never totally immune from hurricanes, and it only takes one to make it a dangerous – and unforgettable – season. Colin Zarzycki, Associate Professor of Meteorology and Climate Dynamics, Penn State This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Children can be systematic problem-solvers at younger ages than psychologists had thought – new research
Child psychologists: Celeste Kidd’s research challenges long-standing ideas from Jean Piaget about children’s problem-solving abilities. Her findings show that children as young as four can independently utilize algorithmic strategies to solve complex tasks, contradicting the belief that systematic logical thinking develops only after age seven. This insight highlights the importance of nurturing algorithmic thinking in early education.
I’m in a coffee shop when a young child dumps out his mother’s bag in search of fruit snacks. The contents spill onto the table, bench and floor. It’s a chaotic – but functional – solution to the problem.
Children have a penchant for unconventional thinking that, at first glance, can look disordered. This kind of apparently chaotic behavior served as the inspiration for developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s best-known theory: that children construct their knowledge through experience and must pass through four sequential stages, the first two of which lack the ability to use structured logic.
Piaget remains the GOAT of developmental psychology. He fundamentally and forever changed the world’s view of children by showing that kids do not enter the world with the same conceptual building blocks as adults, but must construct them through experience. No one before or since has amassed such a catalog of quirky child behaviors that researchers even today can replicate within individual children.
While Piaget was certainly correct in observing that children engage in a host of unusual behaviors, mylab recently uncovered evidence that upends some long-standing assumptions about the limits of children’s logical capabilities that originated with his work. Our new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour describes how young children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qb4TPj1pxzQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jean Piaget describes how children of different ages tackle a sorting task, with varying success.
Putting things in order
Throughout the 1960s, Piaget observed that young children rely on clunky trial-and-error methods rather than systematic strategies when attempting to order objects according to some continuous quantitative dimension, like length. For instance, a 4-year-old child asked to organize sticks from shortest to longest will move them around randomly and usually not achieve the desired final order.
Psychologists have interpreted young children’s inefficient behavior in this kind of ordering task – what we call a seriation task – as an indicator that kids can’t use systematic strategies in problem-solving until at least age 7.
Somewhat counterintuitively, my colleagues and I found that increasing the difficulty and cognitive demands of the seriation task actually prompted young children to discover and use algorithmic solutions to solve it.
Piaget’s classic study asked children to put some visible items like wooden sticks in order by height. Huiwen Alex Yang, a psychology Ph.D. candidate who works on computational models of learning in my lab, cranked up the difficulty for our version of the task. With advice from our collaborator Bill Thompson, Yang designed a computer game that required children to use feedback clues to infer the height order of items hidden behind a wall, .
The game asked children to order bunnylike creatures from shortest to tallest by clicking on their sneakers to swap their places. The creatures only changed places if they were in the wrong order; otherwise they stayed put. Because they could only see the bunnies’ shoes and not their heights, children had to rely on logical inference rather than direct observation to solve the task. Yang tested 123 children between the ages of 4 and 10. https://www.youtube.com/embed/GlsbcE6nOxk?wmode=transparent&start=0 Researcher Huiwen Alex Yang tests 8-year-old Miro on the bunny sorting task. The bunnies are hidden behind a wall with only their sneakers visible. Miro’s selections exemplify use of selection sort, a classic efficient sorting algorithm from computer science. Kidd Lab at UC Berkeley.
More than half the children we tested demonstrated evidence of structured algorithmic thinking, and at ages as young as 4 years old. While older kids were more likely to use algorithmic strategies, our finding contrasts with Piaget’s belief that children were incapable of this kind of systematic strategizing before 7 years of age. He thought kids needed to reach what he called the concrete operational stage of development first.
Our results suggest that children are actually capable of spontaneous logical strategy discovery much earlier when circumstances require it. In our task, a trial-and-error strategy could not work because the objects to be ordered were not directly observable; children could not rely on perceptual feedback.
Explaining our results requires a more nuanced interpretation of Piaget’s original data. While children may still favor apparently less logical solutions to problems during the first two Piagetian stages, it’s not because they are incapable of doing otherwise if the situation requires it.
A systematic approach to life
Algorithmic thinking is crucial not only in high-level math classes, but also in everyday life. Imagine that you need to bake two dozen cookies, but your go-to recipe yields only one. You could go through all the steps of making the recipe twice, washing the bowl in between, but you’d never do that because you know that would be inefficient. Instead, you’d double the ingredients and perform each step only once. Algorithmic thinking allows you to identify a systematic way of approaching the need for twice as many cookies that improves the efficiency of your baking.
Algorithmic thinking is an important capacity that’s useful to children as they learn to move and operate in the world – and we now know they have access to these abilities far earlier than psychologists had believed.
That children can engage with algorithmic thinking before formal instruction has important implications for STEM – science, technology, engineering and math –education. Caregivers and educators now need to reconsider when and how they give children the opportunity to tackle more abstract problems and concepts. Knowing that children’s minds are ready for structured problems as early as preschool means we can nurture these abilities earlier in support of stronger math and computational skills.
And have some patience next time you encounter children interacting with the world in ways that are perhaps not super convenient. As you pick up your belongings from a café floor, remember that it’s all part of how children construct their knowledge. Those seemingly chaotic kids are on their way to more obviously logical behavior soon.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
Valley Metro to Exit CAPEX Capitol Extension After Phoenix Council Shifts Focus to Indian School Road Corridor
Valley Metro is shifting its focus on high-capacity transit planning in west Phoenix following a City Council vote, prioritizing a new corridor along Indian School Road while exiting the Capitol Extension project, CAPEX, and seeking community engagement.
Valley Metro is officially shifting gears on high-capacity transit planning in west Phoenix following a Phoenix City Council vote earlier this year.
In a message to the public, Valley Metro said that after the Jan. 27, 2026 City Council decision to re-evaluate high-capacity transit options and prioritize a proposed West Phoenix corridor along Indian School Road, the agency will exit project development and the Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment Grant (CIG) process for the Capitol Extension (CAPEX) project.
What the City Council voted to do
According to Valley Metro, the Phoenix City Council voted to take another look at high-capacity transit options for west Phoenix and to prioritize studying a new corridor alignment along Indian School Road.
What Valley Metro is doing next
Valley Metro emphasized it still supports expanding high-capacity transit in west Phoenix, citing demand and mobility needs in the corridor. But the agency says it will now pivot away from CAPEX and toward the new study effort.
Key next steps Valley Metro outlined include:
Exiting the CAPEX project development process and the federal CIG pipeline
Advancing planning for the West Phoenix study along Indian School Road
Centering comprehensive community engagement, including outreach to residents, business owners, and stakeholders along the corridor
Working closely with the City of Phoenix on project development
Coordinating with the Federal Transit Administration to explore funding opportunities
How to stay engaged
Valley Metro is encouraging residents to sign up for updates as the next phase moves forward at valleymetro.org/notices.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
In World War II’s dog-eat-dog struggle for resources, a Greenland mine launched a new world order
Greenland’s cryolite mine, vital for U.S. airplane production during World War II, became strategically important after Nazi invasions of Europe. President Roosevelt emphasized its significance in national security, advocating for its protection. This shifted U.S. resource access policies and shaped post-war international relations, prioritizing strategic minerals and military bases.
On April 9, 1940, Nazi tanks stormed into Denmark. A month later, they blitzed into Belgium, Holland and France. As Americans grew increasingly rattled by the spreading threat, a surprising place became crucial to U.S. national security: the vast, ice-capped island of Greenland.
The island, a colony of Denmark’s at the time, was rich in mineral resources. The Nazi invasions left it and several other European colonies as international orphans.
Greenland was essential for air bases as U.S. planes flew to Europe, and also for strategic minerals. Greenland’s Ivittuut (formerly Ivigtut) mine contained the world’s only reliable supply of the most important material you’ve probably never heard of: cryolite, a frosty white mineral that the U.S. and Canadian industries relied upon to refine bauxite into aluminum, and thus essential to assembling a modern air force.
People sometimes forget that World War II was a dog-eat-dog struggle for resources – oil and uranium but also dozens of other materials, everything from rubber to copper. Without these strategic materials, no modern military could produce crucial new weapons such as tanks and airplanes. The resource struggle often started before actual fighting.
During the spring of 1940, America and its European allies mapped out patterns of resource use and ideas of global interconnection that would shape the international order for decades. Greenland helped give birth to this new order.
Rethinking American vulnerability
On May 16, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress, including many “American first” isolationists wary of European entanglements. Roosevelt implored Americans to wake up to new threats in the world – to, in his words, “recast their thinking about national protection.”
New weapons, he warned, had shrunk the world, and oceans could no longer shield the United States. The nation’s fate was inextricably tied to Europe’s. Nothing showed this better than Greenland: “From the fiords of Greenland,” FDR warned, “it is four hours by air to Newfoundland; five hours to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and to the province of Quebec; and only six hours to New England.”Richard Edes Harrison’s famous WWII maps in Fortune magazine, including this one from 1942, changed American understandings of vulnerability by highlighting short aerial routes. Dark areas are considered Axis, dotted areas pro-Axis neutral or Axis-occupied, red areas Allies and yellow areas neutral. Pink areas, including Greenland, were considered Allies-occupied. Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography
But Greenland set off alarm bells for another reason. To protect itself in a dangerous world, Roosevelt famously called for the U.S. to hammer out 50,000 planes a year. But in 1938, America had produced only 1,800 planes.
To meet this ambitious goal, Roosevelt and his advisers knew that little could be done without Greenland. No Greenland, no cryolite. No cryolite, no massive American air force. Without cryolite, making 50,000 planes would be infinitely more difficult.
The age of alloys
Americans, National Geographic explained in 1942, lived in an “age of alloys.” Without aluminum alloys and other metallic mixtures, assembly lines churning out modern tanks, trucks and airplanes would grind to a halt. “More than any other struggle in history, this is a war of many metals, and the lack of a single one may be a blow far worse than the loss of a battle.”
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Aluminum was crucial for modern militaries. Mechanics check an airplane engine at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas, in November 1942. Fenno Jacobs/Department of Defense
Few materials mattered more than aluminum. Light yet strong, aluminum formed 60% of a heavy bomber’s engines, 90% of its wings and fuselage, and all of its propellers.
But there was a problem: Refining aluminum from bauxite ore required working with dangerously hot metallic mixtures, over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius). Cryolite solved the problem by reducing the temperature to a more manageable 900 F (480 C).
The Nazis’ chemical industry had found a substitute for cryolite using fluorspar, but the U.S. preferred the more resource-efficient cryolite and wanted to prevent the Germans from having it.
After the Nazis seized Denmark
Just days after German tanks rolled into Denmark in April 1940, Allied officials huddled to devise ways to protect Ivittuut’s magical mineral. On May 3, Danish Ambassador to the U.S. Henrik de Kauffmann, risking trial for treason, requested American assistance. On May 10, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche departed New England for Ivittuut. Four others soon followed, one with guns for the mine’s defenders.The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche played a role in protecting Greenland mining operations starting long before the U.S. officially entered World War II. Thomas B. MacMillan, Courtesy of Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, Bowdoin College
That very week in Washington, at a meeting of the Pan American Union, Roosevelt and his advisers spoke with hundreds of geologists and other representatives from Latin America — a resource-rich region that the U.S. saw as an answer to its strategic materials shortages.
Nervous about the history of U.S. imperial high-handedness in the region, some Latin Americans thought that their countries should seal off their resources to outside control, as Mexico had in nationalizing U.S. and European oil holdings in 1938.Japan’s advances in Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor cut off rubber from the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia, prompting a rush for rubber in the Amazon and the development of synthetics. World War II posters urged Americans to conserve rubber for the war effort. U.S. Government Printing Office, Courtesy of Northwestern University Libraries
With European empires crumbling, Roosevelt faced a delicate diplomatic dance with Greenland. He wanted to maintain the appearance of neutrality, keep skeptical isolationists in Congress from revolting and give no provocations to Latin American anti-imperialists to cut off resources. Crucially, he also needed to avoid giving the resource-starved Japanese a legal justification to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia – another European colony orphaned by the Nazi invasion.
Roosevelt’s solution: enlist Coast Guard “volunteers” to guard Ivittuut. By the end of the summer, long before the U.S. officially entered the war, 15 sailors resigned from their ships and took up residence near the mine.
Maj. William S. Culbertson, a former U.S. trade official speaking before the Army Industrial College in fall 1940, noted how the scramble for resources pulled the U.S. into a form of nonmilitary warfare: “We are engaged at the present time in economic warfare with the totalitarian powers. Publicly, our politicians don’t state it quite as bluntly as that, but it is a fact.” For the rest of the century, the front line was just as likely a far-off mine as an actual battlefield.
On April 9, 1941, exactly a year after the Nazis seized Denmark, Kauffmann met with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to sign an agreement “on behalf of the King of Denmark” placing Greenland and its mines under the U.S. security blanket. At Narsarsuaq, on the island’s southern tip, the U.S. began constructing an airbase named “Bluie West One.”An aerial view shows Bluie West One, a U.S. air base at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, in June 1942. Later, during the Cold War, the U.S. used Thule Air Base, now called Pituffik Space Base, in northwest Greenland as a key missile defense site because of its proximity to the USSR. USAF Historical Research Agency
What transpired in Greenland in the 18 months before Pearl Harbor fit into a larger emerging pattern.
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As the U.S. ascended to global leadership and realized that it couldn’t maintain military dominance without wide access to foreign materials, it began to redesign the global system of resource flows and the rules for this new international order.A 1952 chart from the President’s Materials Policy Commission, established by President Harry Truman to study the security of U.S. raw materials during the Cold War. The group was commonly known as the Paley Commission. Resources for Freedom: A Report to the President
It rejected the Axis’ “might makes right” territorial conquest for resources, but found other ways to guarantee American access to critical resources, including loosening trade restrictions in European colonies.
The result was a postwar world interconnected by trade and low tariffs, but also a global network of U.S. bases and alliances of sometimes questionable legitimacy designed in part to protect U.S. access to strategic resources.President John F Kennedy meets with Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the White House in 1963. Starting in the 1940s, the African country provided the U.S. with cobalt and uranium, including for the Hiroshima bomb. CIA-supported coups in 1960 and 1965 helped put Mobutu, known for corruption, in power. Keystone/Getty Images
During the Cold War, these global resources helped defeat the Soviet Union. However, these security imperatives also gave the U.S. license for support of authoritarian regimes in places like Iran, Congo and Indonesia.
America’s voracious appetite for resources also often displaced local populations and Indigenous communities, justified by the old claim that they misused the resources around them. It left environmental damage from the Arctic to the Amazon.Donald Trump’s son visited Greenland in 2025, shortly after the U.S. president began talking about wanting to control the island and its resources. The people with Donald Trump Jr., second from right, are wearing jackets reading ‘Trump Force One.’ Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
Strategic resources have been at the center of the American-led global system for decades. But U.S. actions today are different. The cryolite mine was a working mine, rarer than today’s proposed critical mineral mines in Greenland, and the Nazi threat was imminent. Most important, Roosevelt knew how to gain what the U.S. needed without a “damn-what-the world-thinks” military takeover.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
