As forecasters keep a wary eye on a new tropical system churning toward South Florida, longtime Mobile-based broadcast meteorologist Alan Sealls says the current hurricane season is a reminder of how quickly a quiet stretch of summer can turn dangerous.
The season had been relatively calm until the past week, when attention turned to a strengthening storm approaching the Florida coast. Sealls cautions that recent history offers no guarantees about what comes next. Last month it was Hurricane Barry causing concern to the west. Fourteen years ago this week, it was Hurricane Katrina, a storm Sealls covered on television as it devastated the Gulf Coast.
Katrina remains one of the starkest illustrations of a fact meteorologists repeat every season: a hurricane’s category rating does not necessarily predict its storm surge. Katrina proved catastrophic in that regard, killing more than 1,800 people, the majority in New Orleans after levees and floodwalls failed or were breached. The Mississippi coast recorded storm surge heights never seen before, with widespread destruction. Surge from the storm also pushed into Mobile Bay and the Florida Panhandle, leaving lasting damage far from where the storm made landfall.
Beyond the surge, Katrina brought destructive winds and spawned tornadoes across a broad swath of the Southeast, compounding losses and reshaping communities for years afterward. For meteorologists like Sealls who tracked the storm in real time, it remains one of the defining events of their careers.
Sealls, who has spent decades forecasting weather for South Alabama television audiences, is currently on a professional hiatus from local TV broadcasting. He said he hopes to return to the air within a matter of months, though the timing isn’t entirely in his hands. In the meantime, he continues to live in Mobile and teaches a weather broadcasting course each spring at the University of South Alabama.
The break has also given him time to revisit an old passion for storytelling in print. Sealls launched a new biweekly weather column, describing it as something of a return to his roots. Long before his television career, he delivered newspapers on foot for years as a paperboy, covering a 40-house route rain or shine, through winter mornings in the teens and summer afternoons pushing 100 degrees. He said the experience taught him early lessons about people, responsibility and how weather touches nearly every part of daily life, lessons that eventually steered him toward a career studying the atmosphere.
Sealls also keeps an active presence online between broadcasts. His YouTube channel, Alan Sealls Weather, recently featured a retrospective look back at Katrina, and his Facebook page of the same name remains a gathering spot for weather enthusiasts around the region who share storm photos and ask questions about how the atmosphere behaves. He also continues to visit area schools and community organizations to talk about weather and forecasting.
With the Atlantic hurricane season approaching its statistical peak, Sealls said residents should expect more storms to develop, though exactly how many, and where they might go, remains impossible to predict this far out. He urged coastal residents not to panic over every cluster of clouds that shows up on social media, but to stay prepared for the real possibility of a tropical storm or hurricane affecting the area before the season winds down. Readiness, he said, is simply part of living along the Gulf Coast.