I have been working on Aegir-Ran on the hard for the past two months. Everyone in the work yard have been complaining about how much hotter and more humid that normal, and how the summer weather is lasting longer than normal. NPR recently published a story that discussed the relationship between the weather and storms. In the story there was a chart that confirmed my suspicions that the water is warmer than normal.
Warm water fuels hurricanes and the unusually warm temperatures of 2024 have no doubt contributed to conditions that allowed Hurricane Beryl formed in June (the most powerful storm ever recorded so early in the season) and why Helene and Milton (both Category 4 storms) formed in the Gulf of Mexico within two weeks of one another in September.