William Gray Major Quotations

Regardless of whether a major hurricane makes landfall this year, it is inevitable that we will see hurricane-spawned destruction in coming years on a scale many, many times greater than we have in the past.

We do not expect to see as many land-falling major hurricanes in the United States as we have experienced in 2004 and 2005.

We feel the 1999 season will be comparable to the one just past and not too much weaker than the 1995 and 1996 seasons, both of which were very busy. Climatic evidence strongly suggests that we are embarking on a new era of enhanced major hurricane activity.

We are going to see the return of some of these types of storms. People have to face up to it. The insurance industry has a major problem.

The United States has been very lucky over the past three decades in witnessing very few major hurricanes making landfall in Florida and along the East Coast,

Even though the U.S. has experienced six major hurricane strikes since August 2004, in terms of the number of U.S. major hurricane strikes during the last 11 years (nine of 43, versus one of three for the century-long average) we have been, from this perspective, somewhat fortunate,

Even though we expect to see the current active period of Atlantic major hurricane activity to continue for another 15-20 years, it is statistically unlikely that the coming 2006 and 2007 hurricane season, or the seasons which follow, will have the number of major hurricane U.S. landfall events as we have seen in 2004-2005.

There have been a heck of a lot of storms in the Caribbean in the last 11 years. You've dodged a bunch of them. In any one year the probability of a major storm striking the Virgin Islands is low, but you'll at least be watching more storms pass to the north and south of you than in the down period from 1970 to 1994.

This in turn has led to a number of Atlantic Ocean and global oceanic circulation changes that have brought on more major storms during the past four years. The pattern is very similar to what was occurring in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

Climatic evidence strongly suggests that we are embarking on a new era of enhanced major hurricane activity.

The climate signals are such that this looks like it's going to be an active year. Atlantic sea-surface temperatures are very warm. That's a major factor.

The last major storm to come through Florida, before Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992, was Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which went through the Keys.