As hurricane season ends Sunday, it looks like Florida has been spared. In fact, the whole country was spared for the first time in a decade.
That being said, a warming climate is still causing storms to intensify more rapidly, the way Hurricane Melissa did before slamming Jamaica as a deadly Category 5 in October.
WUSF's Jessica Meszaros spoke with University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy about this. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation.
How would you describe the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season?
Well, the one word I would pick for it is “unusual.” It has a lot of odd attributes that I'm sure we can dig into.
Let's dig into them. So, what kind of attributes are we talking here?
Overall, it ended close to average, maybe slightly above an average hurricane season. But that average came about by some very kind of low-end sorts of signatures and some very high-end kind of signatures.
Really for about three weeks in the heart of hurricane season was completely quiet. We had three Category Five hurricanes, which is the second most on record.
We had the first time in 10 years without a hurricane landfall in the United States, and we had the latest forming first name storm since 2014, so a lot of pluses and minuses in there that will end up to kind of create a slightly above average season.
Last year was a really active hurricane season, especially for Florida's west coast. Why was it so active here a year ago and then very quiet this year? I mean, we're really grateful. Don't get me wrong. It's just, I think it's important to understand the science behind it.
Hurricane seasons vary quite a lot from one year to the next. There can be different large scale atmospheric patterns going on that can introduce less or more vertical wind shear across large regions of the Atlantic.
You can have different conditions over the African continent, which has an influence on hurricane season, since that's where a lot of the hurricanes form from waves, basically over Africa.
Some of it comes down to luck. There can be a close call. There can be storms that may be the conditions exactly when they were cruising through that part of the Atlantic were either too much wind shear, too much dry air, which on some other year, that exact combination might have been in place, and you would have had a hurricane form then.
So, there is just that little bit of luck ingredient of where and when things form. We had that anomalous troughiness set up over the southeast U.S., with that anomalous counterclockwise flow around it, which steered hurricanes away from the U.S.
I think we just had a combination of factors that worked very much in the favor of the U.S. this year, but I wouldn't count on that happening each year.
Some meteorologists and climate experts say even if we have fewer storms, like this season we've just experienced, the storms we do have are more likely to rapidly intensify due to warming oceans.
So, to me, that basically means stretches of quiet and calm followed by maybe bursts of more powerful storms. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, I think that's pretty well agreed upon ... it's not something you want to point to in any individual season. It's kind of those things you look for in long-term trends. This season, for example, though, happens to fit that mold extremely well.
But again, that doesn't mean that that's going to happen one season after another, just perfectly lined up like that. This will help reinforce that trend, but next season could be not like this one.
And so, there's a lot of noise in what happens from one year to the next, but that trend is expected to look like that.
