For the first time in 10 years, no hurricane has made landfall in the United States through the end of September. With the peak of hurricane season behind us, it officially comes to an end next month. Assuming things stay quiet, that will be a relief to many communities around the country—several hurricanes in the last five years have ranked among the costliest in U.S. history.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]While it might appear quiet with no blockbuster storms yet, experts say it’s actually been a typical season for the Atlantic Basin.
We’re on the 12th tropical system of the season, which is standard for this time of year. Three hurricanes—Erin, Gabrielle, and Humberto—intensified to at least Category 4 at their peak, with both Erin and Humberto reaching Category 5 intensity, though all of them did so over the Atlantic rather than on land. Only one storm, the short-lived Tropical Storm Chantal in early July, landed on the continental U.S..
“There are storms,” says Jill Trepanier, who researches hurricane climatology at Louisiana State University. “They’re just not making landfall.”
There’s a few reasons for that. “This season has had a lot of varying inter-working parts that are going against one another,” says Trepanier. This includes dry air moving in from the Sahara that helped dry out the atmosphere, and a high pressure system in the Gulf of Mexico that made conditions undesirable for forming hurricanes.
What’s more, a pressure pattern in the Atlantic Ocean that helps direct a storm’s pattern, known as the North Atlantic oscillation, has shifted.
“When that oscillation pattern shifts closer to Bermuda, it unfortunately drives them directly into the Gulf Coast, and the eastern seaboard, which is what we’ve seen in previous years,” says Trepanier. But it’s not always constant—and appears to have shifted up into the North Atlantic. “It changes over the course of a handful of years, and then back again. It’s this controlling mechanism that has shifted, thankfully, in the favor of those of us at the coast.”
We’ve also seen “upper level troughing” off the East Coast, which creates a dip in the jet stream that controls weather patterns. “Systems that are already moving up to the north a bit could be picked up by these troughs and basically pushed to the north and northeast, thus keeping them away from the east coast of the country,” says Charles Konrad, director of the Southeast Regional Climate Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Experts say that it’s only natural to see less active hurricane seasons follow busy ones. It’s true that climate change is warming ocean waters and allowing for more moisture in the atmosphere, creating more intense storms. But many other factors influence whether or not a hurricane forms and how it travels.
“If we go back and look in the distant past, when we didn’t have any climate change, we had really active years and we had years that were inactive,” says Konrad. “There’s a lot of natural variability. And that natural variability isn’t really changing.”
“Sometimes in the climate change discussions, there’s a lot of expectation that every year will be worse than the last,” says Trepanier. “But that is not the way environmental systems operate. There is always a strive for an equilibrium.”
Whether or not that means we’re in the clear remains to be seen. While the Atlantic begins to cool down in late October, the threat remains from the Caribbean and the Gulf, which stay warmer longer. It leaves the possibility open for “homegrown storms,” which form close to the coastline, like last October’s Hurricane Milton.
“We’re getting into the tail end of the season now, so the probability is really going down,” says Konrad. “But we can’t rule it out.”
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