The 2012 Atlantic hurricane season got off to a record-breaking start, with four named storms forming before July for the first time on record. Two of them, Alberto and Beryl, developed before the season even started on June 1.But now forecasters and catastrophe modellers in the insurance industry say that despite that early burst of activity, they’re predicting a “near-average” season.Forecasters with the Tropical Storm Risk (TSR) Consortium predict 14 named storms will form during the 2012 season — five to six hurricanes and two or three major hurricanes. They say one or two hurricanes are forecast to affect the US mainland and there’s only a 36 percent probability of activity being above-average season this year.Experts at Eqecat, a catastrophe risk modelling firm agree, saying the season is likely to be an average one “mainly driven by El Nino”“The recent La Nina has ended and we’re now in a neutral phase,” said John Mangano, a research scientist with Eqecat. “Hurricane landfalls are four times as likely during the cool La Nina phase as during the warm El Nino phase.”Mr Mangano also says the path of Atlantic hurricanes also depends, in part, on the Bermuda-Azores High, a semi-permanent area of high pressure in the Atlantic, south of the Azores and east of Bermuda. When that High moves toward Bermuda, storms churning to the south of it are forced on a more westerly path that can take them to the Caribbean and the southern US. When the High shifts away from Bermuda, storms tend to curve north and stay out to sea.Mr Mangano says the movement of the Bermuda-Azores High is unfortunately harder to predict, making it a less reliable long-term forecasting tool.