FishOutofWater aka George says:

The Atlantic hurricane season of 2013 was weakened by persistent subsidence from the extremely intense Asian monsoon. The strong monsoon extended into Africa. The combination of strong subsidence over the Atlantic, that could be traced back to the strong uplift over south and southeast Asia, with optically dense African dust, killed the developing tropical waves that moved off of Africa.

The warm water off the east coast of the U.S. was not what kept the tropical waves from developing. They died in the dry dusty air in the mid-Atlantic.

The CSU team hypothesized that the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation had shifted. That hypothesis is inconsistent with last year’s above normal season and other evidence. The apparent AMO cycle is much longer than 18 years since the Atlantic became active in 1995. Moreover, Emanuel has proposed that sulfate particulate caused cooling was one reason for the cool temperatures in the 70s and 80s. When Europeans slashed the sulfur pollution the Atlantic warmed up.

The CSU team has a persistent record of changing their methodology after repeated failures. Bill Gray had a good early career but science passed him by in his later years. His climate change science denial was sad to watch and his repeated poor forecasts of hurricane seasons reflected his inability to keep up with changes in science. Just my opinion, of course.

The strongly positive Arctic oscillation in the winters of 1988 to 1995 also pulled warm waters northwards and led to intense hurricane seasons when the AO became less positive and the MDR got very warm.

You live in Florida now so I recommend talking with the AOML and U Miami folks. The heat content anomalies they analyze are more persistent than SSTs.

I think that NOAA has the correct forecast this year. Above normal but not way above normal. The monsoon is a little late and the IMD is predicting a normal monsoon season.
http://www.imd.gov.in/pages/monsoon_main.php
The heat content of the EPac is down from recent years. And the heat content in the mid-Atlantic region of the MDR is up a little.

The westerlies this early June are much stronger than they were in 2013 and the subtropical highs in the NH are weaker. There is strong subsidence in the southern hemisphere especially the southeast Pacific. That’s why the El Niño did not materialize. Weaker subsidence over the Atlantic MDR this May and June is a consequence of this stronger than normal NH jet stream for late spring. Expect the warm up in the MDR to continue in response to this pattern.

Let’s be clear that this year is a tough forecast. I suspect that we will see continued problems with intense October (and maybe November) hurricanes like 2012 and 2016 as Arctic sea ice retreats and high pressure builds over Greenland as darkness descends over the polar region. We might get another weird storm track like Hurricane Sandy’s. Time will tell. The sea ice is so thin this year and its volume is so low that we should expect the unexpected.