As the remnants of Hurricane Idalia battered the Carolina coast, and as Hurricane Franklin churned far off within the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Jose shaped early Thursday, turning into the most recent named storm of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.

Here are three issues to find out about Jose:

• As of 5 a.m. Thursday, Jose had most sustained winds of about 40 miles per hour, simply sufficient to qualify as a named storm, and was about 785 miles east of Bermuda.

• The storm is just not prone to develop a lot stronger.

• Forecasters anticipate that it is going to be absorbed by Hurricane Franklin by the weekend.

Wait, one storm can take up one other?

It can! Here’s how that works.

Jose is weak in comparison with Franklin, which was the Atlantic’s first main hurricane of the yr and stayed at that stage for days. Franklin is starting to weaken and can quickly transition right into a extra typical storm system with heat fronts and chilly fronts, as a substitute of a stable heat cored tropical cyclone.

By the weekend, after doing a bit dance known as the Fujiwhara impact, Jose might be absorbed by Franklin. Think of it much less like Pac-Man consuming a ghost and extra like a sponge absorbing water.

The Fujiwhara impact occurs when two storms orbit round a shared middle level. The impact was named for a Japanese meteorologist, Sakuhei Fujiwhara, who first described the interplay between whirling lots of fluid or air in 1921.

The impact is rather more widespread with cyclones within the west Pacific however does occur within the Atlantic. Sometimes, if the storms are of equal power, they’ll spin round one another after which launch, going their separate methods. Sometimes they may merge and create a stronger storm.

But on this case, the place there’s a extra important storm and a weaker storm, Franklin will simply be Jose’s demise.

Jose is one in every of three energetic storms within the Atlantic.

In addition to Jose and Franklin, one other storm, Idalia, battered small cities alongside the Big Bend area of Florida’s Gulf Coast after making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Wednesday morning. It was transferring by way of South Carolina in a single day. Follow the latest on Idalia here.

There have been 14 named storms final yr, after two extraordinarily busy Atlantic hurricane seasons during which forecasters ran out of names and needed to resort to backup lists. (A record 30 named storms took place in 2020.)

This yr options an El Niño sample, which arrived in June. The intermittent local weather phenomenon can have wide-ranging results on climate around the globe, and it sometimes impedes the variety of Atlantic hurricanes.

In the Atlantic, El Niño will increase the quantity of wind shear, or the change in wind velocity and course from the ocean or land floor into the environment. Hurricanes want a relaxed setting to kind, and the instability attributable to elevated wind shear makes these circumstances much less probably. (El Niño has the other impact within the Pacific, lowering the quantity of wind shear.)

At the identical time, this yr’s heightened sea floor temperatures pose a lot of threats, together with the flexibility to supercharge storms.

That uncommon confluence of things has made stable storm predictions harder.

“Stuff just doesn’t feel right,” mentioned Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, after NOAA launched its up to date forecast in August. “There’s just a lot of kind of screwy things that we haven’t seen before.”

There is stable consensus amongst scientists that hurricanes are becoming more powerful due to local weather change. Although there won’t be extra named storms total, the probability of main hurricanes is growing.

Climate change can be affecting the quantity of rain that storms can produce. In a warming world, the air can maintain extra moisture, which implies a named storm can maintain and produce extra rainfall, like Hurricane Harvey did in Texas in 2017, when some areas acquired greater than 40 inches of rain in lower than 48 hours.