Hurricane experts Philip Klotzbach and William Gray, the two Colorado State University meteorologists, have announced that they forecast 13 named storms for 2008, including seven hurricanes, three of which will be classified as major.

"Despite fairly inactive 2006 and 2007 hurricane seasons, we believe that the Atlantic basin is still in an active hurricane cycle," said meteorologist William Gray.

"This active cycle is expected to continue at least for another decade or two. After that, we're likely to enter a quieter Atlantic major hurricane period like we experienced during the quarter-century periods of 1970-1994 and 1901-1925."

Although Gray's team at Colorado State University erred their last two forecasts, he is confident the 2008 forecast is more accurate. Gray has been predicting hurricanes for about 25 years now. This year, his team's forecast is based on a new method which relies on water temperatures in the Atlantic and Pacific and the relationship between barometric pressure and altitude over the Atlantic.

"With this early lead time, there's only so much you can say, because the season doesn't start for another seven months," Klotzbach said to Bloomberg. "The reason we do them is there's a lot of curiosity. People want to start making plans."

Official forecasts only come out just weeks before the hurricane season starts: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issues its first forecast in May.

Klotzbach and Gray said that there is a chance of around 60 percent that at least one major hurricane will hit the U.S. mainland sometime next year. There's approximately an even chance that a major hurricane will hit the U.S. East Coast, including Florida, or that one will hit the U.S. Gulf Coast between Florida and Brownsville, Texas.

Many are skeptical about long term forecasts, but allegedly the new prediction model explains hurricane variability in storms from 1950 to 2007. Gray's team claims that in 45 out of 58 years, their model correctly forecast above- or below-average seasons.