With just three weeks before the Atlantic hurricane season lurches into action, odds are more than 40 percent that a big storm could cross the giant spill gushing from beneath a ruptured well on the seabed.

An April 20 blast sank the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform, killing 11 workers and leaving its uncontrolled well to gush millions of gallons of oil into the gulf waters.

Last month, forecasters who issue a closely watched Colorado State University seasonal forecast said there was a 44 percent chance a hurricane would enter the Gulf of Mexico in the next few months, far greater than the 30 percent historic average.

"The high winds may distribute oil over a wide area," said National Hurricane Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen.

What's more "storm surges may carry oil inland, mixed with hurricane debris," he added, presumably with environmental consequences.

The movement of the oil would depend much on the track of the hurricane, according to Feltgen, who said a hurricane passing to the west of the oil slick could drive a large volume of oil to the fragile coastline.

Yet "high winds and seas will mix and 'weather' the oil, which helps accelerate the biodegradation process," he noted.

Nick Shay, an expert in meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami, said a number of unknown factors could also take place, such as how oil, seawater and hurricanes interact.

"It's a complex problem that really needs to be looked at in great detail to try to understand what the oceanic response is when you have an oil layer at the sea surface," he added.

"Having the oil slick on top of the water changes things, changes how fast things move around, but the point is the wind curve being encouraged by the hurricane, the waves, how the wind and oil interact."

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are studying how an oil spill interacts with a hurricane, in a bid to determine whether it reliably weakens or strengthens the storm.

Since storms are fueled in part by evaporation from the sea surface, if a sufficiently thick layer of oil weakens the process, the slick could actually help minimize the size of the storm, Feltgen ventured.

"The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season will be somewhat more active than the average," Colorado State University's top hurricane expert William Gray told AFP in February.

He said there was a 49 percent chance a tropical storm would track close to Haiti this year.

Gray's team predicts between 11 and 16 tropical storms will form in the Atlantic this year, up from the average nine to 10.

They expect six to eight of the storms will become full-fledged hurricanes, up from the five to six that usually gain the designation each year.

The team forecasts up to five of those storms will become major hurricanes, reaching the top three categories on the Saffir-Simpson scale, producing wind speeds ranging from 111 to 155 miles (96 to 155 kilometers) per hour.

The chance that the Caribbean as a whole will be hit by a major hurricane is 58 percent -- above the normal 42 percent probability of the past century, according to their study conducted in December.

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