Today marks the first day of the 2005 Hurricane Season, and after last season in Florida we'd hope it would be a quiet one. The meteorologists at Colorado State University say it'll be an above average year with 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes, and 4 major hurricanes. I personally think the number is a bit high, but we'll see. I tend to be optimistic about the season in general. This is the 10th hurricane season this site has been running during.

As we start off the year, there is nothing worthy of note in the tropics yet, but we'll keep an eye out.

Last year was an exception. Hurricane Charley slammed into Punta Gorda was the storm that started the Florida series. Followed by Frances, which hit near Stuart, Ivan which had Mobile, AL in its sights, veered slightly east saving Mobile the worst, but giving Pensacola a wallop, including much beach damage and knocking out the interstate 10 bridge.

Jeanne was the one that did the most damage to me personally, along the coast in New Smyrna Beach. Although not as strong as the others, the storm surge along the coast was higher than I've ever seen in New Smyrna basically destroying our beach there. We were lucky compared to Pensacola with Ivan, however.

There are plenty of hurricane specials on local media, and events going on at local malls this week. Feel free to reply and state them if you know of them. Preparation is key as usual, this next week or so taxes will be removed on supplies (see the prior news article for details).

Outside of Florida must watch out as well. It's been years since Florida has had a year even close to last year. But it only takes one major storm to ruin your area. Keep watch, don't panic. And we'll all be anxiously watching the tropics this year. Thanks for visiting the site. I hope to improve it a lot this year.

We are still looking for reasonable server collocation facilities for our servers. Our bandwidth has very unusual requirements in that only one or two months a year we tend to spike, and spike very very hard when hurricane events happen, while the rest is comparatively slow, if you have a recommendation or offer please send it to cfhc@flhurricane.com

Soon we'll be adding volunteer professional meteorologist blogs on site, in addition to what we have now with Snonut, from a few other partners that have been a great help to the site over the years. This should be up in the coming weeks. We've also added coordinate history for all of last year's storms. Skeetobite will likely be doing a few maps again when the time calls as well.

Be hurricane prepared! And always, always, if in any doubt, take the word of the National Hurricane Center over anything you read on the internet, here or otherwise.

Jim Williams at Hurricane City will be doing an 8PM broadcast tonight for the season kickoff.