With the passage of sports betting as legal in the state of North Carolina, that has brought about some interesting prospects. I’m talking with Corey Davis, the Assistant State Climatologist from North Carolina on this, and I’m wagering that we can come up with some interesting bets for this spring’s weather particularly for the month of April.  As we look into the month of April, here’s your first one. Give me your odds on this one will April be wetter or drier than normal here in the Carolinas.

“Well, for starters, it’s probably useful to say what our normal precipitation is in April in North and South Carolina. It’s around three and a half inches. But some of the forecasts we’ve looked at for the next few weeks are showing maybe a more variable precipitation pattern. I think it’ll be close, but I am going to go with the over and say we have a wet April in the Carolinas.”

Okay, now this one concerns hurricane season. How many named storms will form in the Atlantic this hurricane season? I’m gonna give you an over under of 21. What say you?

“Well, Mike, first off just to appreciate how high that number is. The average number of storms in the Atlantic is about 14 per years. So we’re already talking about a 50% increase over that average. The first preseason forecast that we’ve seen from Colorado State University is going for 23 names storms this year. Again, unbelievable to see a forecast with that much activity. It really does look like it may be lining up for potential record activity this year.”

I know you mentioned the storm names. So let’s go there for our next question. Which storm name will be the most damaging this year? I know you’ve got the list of names there. Maybe you can give us some of those and which one you think is going to have the most bang this year.

“There’s not a lot of science behind it. But I’d say a little bit of guesswork, maybe a little bit of intuition. So a lot of times it’s early season storms maybe don’t have quite the strength or quite the oomph to do a lot of damage. So I’m gonna look a little bit further down the list. So I’m looking at a few kind of in the middle: Milton, Nadine, Oscar, all those sounds like they could maybe be a menacing name, but especially thinking about that potential timing, late September, early October, at or just after the peak of the season. I think those are the ones to watch.”